Question

I’m trying to use System.Xml.Linq to create XHTML documents. Thus, the vast majority of the nodes in my trees ought to use this namespace:

http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml 

I can create XElement nodes scoped to this namespace easily enough, using an XNamespace, like this:

XNamespace xhtml = 'http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'; // ... new XElement(xhtml + 'html', // ... 

However, I don’t want to have to make an XNamespace available throughout all the code that creates HTML nodes, and have to prefix every single XElement (and XAttribute) name I create accordingly.

The XML text format itself takes this requirement into account, and permits setting a default namespace in an ancestor which is inherited by descendants, using the reserved xmlns attribute. I’d like to do something similar using System.Xml.Linq.

Is this possible?

Answer 1

I’ve decided to use a static class called XHtml, that looks like this:

public static class XHtml {     static XHtml()     {         Namespace = 'http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml';     }      public static XNamespace Namespace { get; private set; }      public static XElement Element(string name)     {         return new XElement(Namespace + name);     }      public static XElement Element(string name, params object[] content)     {         return new XElement(Namespace + name, content);     }      public static XElement Element(string name, object content)     {         return new XElement(Namespace + name, content);     }      public static XAttribute Attribute(string name, object value)     {         return new XAttribute(/* Namespace + */ name, value);     }      public static XText Text(string text)     {         return new XText(text);     }      public static XElement A(string url, params object[] content)     {         XElement result = Element('a', content);         result.Add(Attribute('href', url));         return result;     } } 

This seems to be the cleanest way of doing things, particularly as I can then add in convenience routines, such as the XHtml.A method (not all of my class is shown here).