[4suite] Article: Gems From the [XML-SIG] Archives

[Craeg K Strong]

>
>
> If you are interested in a bit of a mind-bending experimentation in 
> XML output using Python idioms, see this message 
> <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/xml-sig/1998-October/000423.html> by 
> Greg Stein. As an example of the very interesting perspective it 
> provides, the following snippet should generate a bit of XHTML:
>
>|f = Factory()
>body = f.body(bgcolor='#ffffff').p.a(href='l.html').img(src='l.gif')
>html = f.html[f.head.title('title'), body]  |
>
> I think you'll agree this is delightfully twisted.
>

Good catch!  The above seems to me a quite natural and Pythonic way to 
produce XML.
It reminds me of Jakarta's Element Construction Set ( 
http://jakarta.apache.org/ecs ) which we
have been using to produce XML from Java for some time:

Html html = new Html()
              .addElement(new Head()
                  .addElement(new Title("Demo")))
              .addElement(new Body()
              .addElement(new H1("Demo Header"))
              .addElement(new H3("Sub Header:"))
              .addElement(new Font().setSize("+1")
                         .setColor(HtmlColor.WHITE)
                         .setFace("Times")
                         .addElement("The big dog & the little cat chased each other.")));
out.println(html.toString()); 

Of course, Python's built in introspection capabilities make it much
more terse.  Yay, Python.

--Craeg


Uche Ogbuji wrote:

> http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2003/04/09/py-xml.html
>
> "In this and in subsequent articles I will mine the richness of the 
> XML-SIG mailing list for some of its choicest bits of code. I start in 
> this article with a couple of very handy snippets from 1998 and 1999. 
> Where necessary, I have updated code to use current APIs, style, and 
> conventions in order to make it immediately useful to readers. All 
> code in this article was tested using Python 2.2.1 and PyXML 0.8.2."