Question

Trying to come up with a basic way to display code in a way that would be nicely maintainable, I thought of doing something like this:

echo htmlfunction('a',array('href'=>'http://google.com'),'google');

to generate:

<a href="http://google.com">google</a>

this would use as a global scale function to output all html tags. that way, if I ever wanted to change the way my html is displayed, I could easily do it with one tweak.

does using this kind of outputting mean a grave loss of agility in performance?

thanks.

Answer 1

No, but you would be reinventing the wheel and in a wrong way.

Instead of writing echo title("bar"); to echo <title>bar</title>, use a templating engine to output your dynamic data inside a static HTML template, that looks like <title>$title</title> where your code has $template->assign('title','bar');.

That way you will be keeping markup as markup and code as code and in separate files, which is a worthy goal in at least the maintainability and flexibility departments.

Look, for example, at Smarty