The ugly web is over; the trick is to add a Django middleware to process every HttpResponse (with content-type text/html) of Django using BeautifulSoup. The source-code of the middleware is simple:

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup

class BeautifulMiddleware(object):
    def process_response(self, request, response):
        if response.status_code == 200:
            if response["content-type"].startswith("text/html"):
                beauty = BeautifulSoup(response.content)
                response.content = beauty.prettify()
        return response

We simple check for HTTP response code 200 and then check for a “text/html” content and use BeautifulSoup to process the response. See an example of what it does:

1) I’d a html in my Django application, very ugly and with missing tags:

This HTML template will be rendered as showed above by Django without the BeautifulSoup middleware, but with the middleware pluged in the settings of your Django app, it will render that html source:

BeautifulSoup has figured out sensible places to put the closing tags of the HTML source and has created a pretty indented structure, automagically =)

It’s very easy and interesting create new django middlewares, examples can be JavaScript obfuscators, compressors, automatic performance analysis of html code to improve the render speed of browser and these sort of things.