Some time in late 2003, Adrian and I decided that errors in templates
were best handled silently - the idea was that it would prevent
untrained template editors from being able to 500-error a site with a
typo.

Is it too late to reconsider this decision, four and a half years
later? I can't think of a single time this feature has helped me, and
plenty of examples of times that it has tripped me up.

Today's example: a <form action=""> tag that shouldn't have been
blank. The code looked like this:

<form action="{% url something-with-a-typo %}">

If you look at Django's URL tag implementation, you can see why:

http://code.djangoproject.com/browser/django/trunk/django/template/de...

The code catches the NoReverseMatch exception and silences it,
outputting an empty string instead.

Silent errors are bad. If we were to remove them, how much of a
negative impact would it have on the existing user base?

Cheers,

Simon