Well, my overall reaction is that my nice, simple ad_form idea has been fubar'd beyond belief. I had no idea that people were turning into a general record display mechanism.
No wonder no one - including me - understands how it works any more!
For the record, Ola ... the WHOLE IDEA behind the form template builder is to combine add/edit scripts into one. ad_form makes it very easy to do so as it understands the form builder's state information, simplifying things. So I'm glad you've taken this approach though folding in display, too - YUK. GROSS. DISGUSTING.
I'm depressed that folks are writing separate add and edit/view scripts. The benefit of being able to share a single form declaration for both add and edit functions should be obvious. This sharing's 90% of the point of taking the form builder approach. Apparently the adding of the display functionality has made combining add/edit scripts along with display functionality enough of a hassle that people are giving up on that, as has Joel in his example.
There are many fundamental differences between a template that displays data and a form handling page. The FORM tag comes to mind among other things ...
I called it "ad_form" for a reason ...
