htmx

The main thing that's I *really* don't like about Django forms is how hard it is to style them.

Even when using something like `crispy` it's a total mess trying to get a `toggle switch` instead of a `checkbox`

I dislike crispy, I'd rather write html directly vs python that looks like html

and I agree, django forms have always been frustrating to style

it always felt to me that fields should just take a klass="a b c" kwarg

and then when rendering the field just attach class="a b c" to it

that wouldn't fix structure issues with as_div or as_p  or the error list stuff

I always ended up writing the html for the forms by hand and just manually calling out the name/label/past value

I was excited for the template stuff that came with 4.0, and it's helpful but still not enough

I liked floppy forms because I could style each field consistently and then handle the layout

Didn't look into 4.0 yet; but while `crispy` gets more hype for what it is, I'm generally happy with the  output it produces. Tried going down the path of writing all form-fields out manually and styling around them, but that just doesn't scale well imo.

if crispy works for you then good - I like the idea of it

I just found it faster to do the html directly

tbf that was django v 2 or something so it could have gotten better

Forms are basically serializers. And DRF serializers can render forms (as seen in DRF APIView). Wish it was easier to just use DRF serializers as forms tbh

So you don't have to specify serializing logic twice in two different application parts

I think drf is great but django could do more to support json/api at a fundamental level

I was thinking about that a lot around xmas - what could django do more of - and I think I want to take a crack at writing a new template backend

that does components as a first class thing

I played around with slippers + django component and found them both a little awkward

Ahhh; still didn't get around of trying slippers (https://mitchel.me/slippers/docs/introduction/) but it looks exactly like what everyone using Django needs