> But what about the DOM objects like radio buttons, text area etc in the > html ?. When the view file is processed and the response object is working > on it to generate pure HTML , won't it create a DOM tree structure in > memory. ?. >
No, if you just hand code the form HTML in the view but never create a FORM or SQLFORM object, you don't get any server-side DOM. The server-side DOM comes only with the use of the HTML helpers. If you want to take advantage of the FORM DOM on the server but still want to customize your HTML, check out http://web2py.com/books/default/chapter/29/07#Custom-forms. There are also other benefits of using FORM and SQLFORM in the controller -- they automatically validate user inputs and return and display error messages upon invalid input, and they add a special "formkey" token to the form to prevent CSRF attacks and double form submission. Anthony --
