I'm in the process of learning the Zend Framework.

Here are my issues:

1) Zend_Form generates horrible markup. It does not close input tags properly (uses ">" instead of "/>") and it arbitrarily adds extra markup by putting it in a definition list.

I know that I need to use decorators to fix this, but documentation is kind of vague. How can I fix this?

2) How do I make custom validation errors? I highly doubt ANYONE would use the default error messages...so it should be EASY to define your own custom error messages, right? Does anyone have an example of how this done?

3) How do you validate a field against a database field (e.g. for checking username and password)?

Thanks.