settings.DEFAULT_CONTENT_TYPE incompatibility with admin

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Tim Graham

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Jan 10, 2017, 1:15:24 PM1/10/17
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According to ticket #23908 [0],

By using the setting:

DEFAULT_CONTENT_TYPE = "application/xhtml+xml"


The admin site no longer renders correctly.


Do you think we should try to fix this by having all the admin responses specify content_type="text/html"? That requires a lot of changes [1] -- I'm not sure if discouraging the use of that setting might be acceptable instead. I imagine any third-party app that provides templates has this same problem.


[0] https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/23908

[1] https://github.com/django/django/pull/7807

Adam Johnson

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Jan 12, 2017, 5:54:21 AM1/12/17
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Having reviewed the ticket a bit and thought about it, I've had two thoughts:
  1. The current patch doesn't fix existing custom views which the docs explain how to use, and I've seen used quite often. It's quite likely custom views just return TemplateResponses.
  2. We could fix this instead by making the admin 'incompatible' with DEFAULT_CONTENT_TYPE being set to anything other than text/html with a system check to warn against / enforce this. This is possible because admin is a contrib app rather than part of django core. But perhaps the end result is probably similar to deprecating it, since many (most?) projects use the admin.
  3. This is actually the first time I heard about DEFAULT_CONTENT_TYPE and I think it's quite surprising that it's a setting and can affect all installed apps like this. After all, if a project is sending a lot of e.g. XML responses, it's possible, and probably clearer, to do similar to this PR and subclass TemplateResponse to set a new default for content_type.

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Marc Tamlyn

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Jan 12, 2017, 5:56:49 AM1/12/17
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DEFAULT_CONTENT_TYPE does sound like a setting which shouldn't exist.

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Florian Apolloner

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Jan 12, 2017, 8:11:09 AM1/12/17
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On Thursday, January 12, 2017 at 11:56:49 AM UTC+1, Marc Tamlyn wrote:
DEFAULT_CONTENT_TYPE does sound like a setting which shouldn't exist.

+1

charettes

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Jan 12, 2017, 10:10:51 PM1/12/17
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+1

Aymeric Augustin

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Jan 13, 2017, 3:22:13 AM1/13/17
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Hello,

I agree that this setting has become less useful now that <!DOCTYPE html> has won.

It made more sense when it wasn’t clear whether XHTML1.1 would take over HTML4.

I’d be interested to hear about use cases, if someone still uses it and reads this.

-- 
Aymeric.


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Brian May

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Feb 12, 2017, 7:13:01 AM2/12/17
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On Friday, 13 January 2017 19:22:13 UTC+11, Aymeric Augustin wrote:
I agree that this setting has become less useful now that <!DOCTYPE html> has won.

It made more sense when it wasn’t clear whether XHTML1.1 would take over HTML4.

I’d be interested to hear about use cases, if someone still uses it and reads this.

Sorry for delay in responding.

If you depreciate `DEFAULT_CONTENT_TYPE` I am not sure what you plan to do instead? Would Django hard code "text/html" as the default?

I hadn't realised that the XHTML standards are basically dead (and doesn't appear to be supported in HTML5), in which case this probably makes sense.

Thanks 

Adam Johnson

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Feb 12, 2017, 6:14:24 PM2/12/17
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Would Django hard code "text/html" as the default?

Yes, that's exactly what would happen.

Thanks for the bump up, finally added a ticket: https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/27829

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