This is a proposal to change how Django generates form field labels from
model fields. Currently, `capfirst` is called on `field.verbose_name`
(see
https://github.com/django/django/blob/master/django/db/models/fields/__init__.py#L872).
This behaviour has been around since pretty much forever and makes sense.
However, this affects what you put down in your translations - if a
lowercased verbose name is what you want (and you translate it as such),
Django will make your form labels uppercase and there's no clean way around
that.
There is a very specific use case for this proposal. The house-style of a
design states that all form labels should be lowercase - but names of the
brand should be capitalized. Example: 'you agree to the Brand terms'. This
is not easily feasible: css text-transform will also lowercase the brand
name, and Django uppercases the first letter. Another possible use case
could be if you insist on putting the labels to the right of the form
input, but I will agree that looks silly.
So the proposal is to get rid of the capfirst call, and in the admin this
could be mitigated for backwards compatibility by modifying the css to
include:
label {
text-transform: capitalize;
}
This is ofcourse a fairly big backwards-incompatible change towards
front-end/non-vendor code, as people now have to explicitly make sure that
labels are capitalized in their own templates. So this should probably go
through the usual deprecation mechanics (silent, warning, remove), if it
happens at all.
What are current workarounds for this problem?
- explicitly specifying the label value in the ModelForm definition:
this violates the DRY principle, you already defined the verbose_name on
the model field
- creating a form mixin that will lowercase the first letter of the
label for all fields
- you still have to check if the first word if it's the Brand string,
because then it should stay capitalized
- you now have to include this mixin in every single form, and can no
longer rely on implicitly generated form classes in generic CBV
- create a templatefilter that decapitalizes the label, and
re-capitalizes 'brand' occurrences to 'Brand' (currently implemented)
- you now have to not forget this filter everywhere you render forms
- performance hit if this is based on regular expressions (which in
this case it is because subbrand should not become subBrand)
All in all, I'm of the opinion that the flexibility you gain by NOT
manipulating the label in Django outweighs the backwards incompatible
change. I'm also strongly of the opinion that capitalizing labels is
something that should be done entirely in CSS - whether the label is
capitalized, lower case or upper case shouldn't matter for Django's
internals.
Reasons to not do this:
- cater to common convention, not clients (quoted from #django-dev on
irc): in my opinion this works 95% of the time, but your forced into
violating some of Django's principles if you divert from this, most notably
DRY
- maintain backwards compatibility
Reasons to do this:
- gain flexibility about the display of form labels
- keep the codebase sane
Bonus: vaguely related ticket: https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/5518
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