[albatross-users] al-form, __albform__, and XHTML validation

[Paul Hart]

Hi all,

I'm developing a web application, and one of the requirements is that 
the app must be XHTML 1.1 compliant.

I've downloaded and installed Albatross 1.11pre2, and that has helped 
to fix a few of the problems I've seen before (I was running 1.10 
previously).

Currently there is a single issue remaining. Albatross apparently 
requires the automagically created __albform__ hidden input field to 
make it work correctly. The problem is that XHTML requires a container 
tag (one of "ins", "del", "h1", "h2", "h3", "h4", "h5", "h6", "p", 
"div", "address", or "fieldset") between the form tags and the input 
tags.

For example, this would be valid:
<form action="login" method="post">
	<div>
		Email Address: <input type="text" name="email_address"/><br/>
		Password: <input type="password" name="password"/>
	</div>
	<div>
		<input type="hidden" name="__albform__" value="..." />
	<div>
</form>

But what we get right now is:
<form action="login" method="post">
	<div>
		Email Address: <input type="text" name="email_address"/><br/>
		Password: <input type="password" name="password"/>
	</div>
	<input type="hidden" name="__albform__" value="..." />
</form>

And that is invalid XHTML 1.1.

The quick fix is to alter the code that builds the __albform__ tag to 
enclose it in a div that is hidden. In context.py, the code would be:

         self.write_content('<div style="display: none;"><input 
type="hidden" name="__albform__" value="')
         self.write_content(text)
         self.write_content('" /></div>\n')

The code is such that the div will not be displayed in any browser, and 
so the effect is hidden. Of course, that's just my attempt at fixing 
this, if anyone has any better suggestions, I'd love to hear them :)

Thanks,

Paul Hart