Making Markup Correctly

Tim Bray, on Ruby libraries for generating markup:

All these markup generators adopt two principles:

You call a Ruby method to generate an element; it provides the opening and closing tags and relies on a body to fill in the middle.

To generate a <foo> element, you call a method named foo.

#1 is correct, and makes Ruby a really nice language for generating markup. #2 is completely wrong in the general case.

He then goes on to demo code from his own solution. I agree with this completely — I hate markup-generating libraries that map tag/element names to methods.

★ Monday, 11 September 2006