In my view, 'formstyle' is a parameter of SQLFORM() helper, I dont think it has anything wrong.
In the case of auth, we are not adjusting properties of the form, we are just storing the properties somewhere, that place is auth.settings dictionary. This the same way we do with plugins when using PluginManager, we store the desired properties in to a dict, then use this dict to build the plugin. params = dict(opt1='web',opt2='2py') thing = CREATESOMETHING(**params) The best way to figure out how it is very intuitive is testing and inspecting using the shell, on shell you can see exactly the output of SQLFORM and it is pure HTML. If you want to change that output later, you can navigate using form.elements and use jquery syntax for doing that. Bruno Rocha http://about.me/rochacbruno/bio