elm-form | Dynamic forms handling in Elm | Form library

First of all, this question is both too broad and primarily opinion-based and will probably be closed because of that. It would have been more suited for the forums I think.

That said, I'm going to try to answer it as best as I can anyway, since it's here:

1. Yes? Most modules won't be very useful without exposing something and it's good practice to be explicit about what's being exposed.

2. elm-format is the community standard, so 4 it is.

3. You can't. This is by design. It has also been discussed to death in various fora. Here's one issue discussing it

4. You'd have to ask Evan about that. It might be related to formatting for the web, or just Evan being lazy.

You could use the blur event:

List List Widget should be List (List Widget) instead. Because List List Widget means a totally different (and pretty pointless) thing. However, this is very interesting why Elm compiler even allows List List Widget. I guess this is a bug of the compiler.

Is there a way to POST this form without having to go through the coding gymnastics required to track the value of each field character by character as the user types?

No. To do so would require pulling the values in the form inputs out of the DOM. Elm prevents you from doing that, so yes you need the glorious gymnastics.

...storing the password in the model forever seems like a bad idea.

You don't need to hold on to the password once you're done with it. There are a number of ways to go about it. You can clear it with an empty String, or use a Maybe String, or use a sum type (tags) as the root of your model instead of the typical product type (record) so that you can effectively switch models at run-time. You've got options.

I am not sure what to do once update receives the message that the onSubmit event has fired.

When the onSubmit fires use the Http module to construct a POST request. If the server will respond with data you need (other that status code) you will need to create a Json decoder so Elm can parse the data and produce a typed value (rather than a glob of stuff).

This process will produce a Request, which you'll then need to convert to a Cmd Msg using Http.send This will give you the opportunity to tell Elm what Msg to send to update once the server responds to your request. This Msg will be of type Result Http.Error YourType, which you can process with the functions in the Result module.

The elm-format mechanism is pretty rudimentary, and works as follows:

1) install elm-format for your platform (from github, as you've indicated)

2) add it to your PATH environment variable (i.e. PATH environment variable of the operating system, nothing to do w/ VS Code, etc). The idea is that if you open a command prompt/shell and type elm-format the system should be able to find it

3) set elm.formatOnSave in VS Code (as you've already done)

Now when VS Code saves, if you've installed, say, the elm extension, it'll invoke the elm-format command line utility (installed in 1 above)