Do you use the DOM Extension?

[Raffles]

I find doing this sort of thing quite ugly and somewhat "primitive":

echo "\t\t<p";
if ($something) echo ' class="current"';
echo ">$text</p>\n"; 

or:

if ($something) $c = ' class="current"';
echo "\t\t<p$c>$text</p>\n"; 

Doing this sort of thing with javascript is much nicer:

var p = document.createElement('p');
if (something) p.className = 'insect';
parent.appendChild(p);

It might be more verbose, but it's more readable and it's logical. Even if you're using templates, there must come a point where you have to go through the ugliness above (or something similar to it), so I wonder how MVC advocates deal with this. Do you use PHP's DOM extension? If not, then what do you do?

[jazzslider]

Personally, I only use the DOM extension for two or three reasons:

1. if I really, really, really need to ensure the well-formedness of my output on the fly
2. if I'm developing a really complicated view that requires me to sort dynamic objects into a pre-built HTML container (like, for instance, looping through an unordered array of calendar events and putting them all in the appropriate date cells in a calendar table)
3. if I need to dynamically replace certain elements or attributes in an HTML string with others (for example, if I'm trying to stick to valid XHTML, I sometimes use DOM to replace all 'target="_blank"' attributes with 'rel="external"')

To tell you the truth, though, only #2 has really turned out to be helpful for me. #1 is terrible overkill given that I can validate my pages manually most of the time. #3, meanwhile, is problematic due to how strictly the DOM extension outputs XHTML...I haven't yet figured out a workable way to serve it successfully to all browsers.

If you want to improve the readability of your original example, probably the best thing to do ("best" in the sense of keeping your scripts simple and fast) would be to break it up into smaller chunks and use indentation to show what belongs to what, i.e.:

echo "\t\t";
echo '<p';
    if ($something) {
        echo ' class="current"';
    }
echo '>';
    echo $text;
echo '</p>';
echo PHP_EOL; 

That's more readable to me...but there are a lot more ways you could do it, and I won't say that any of them are right or wrong; readability is, in many cases, a matter of preference.

Personally, though, I find this a lot more readable, and it doesn't result in the same kind of performance hit that the DOM extension would give you. It's still somewhat "primitive," as you say, but primitive can be a very good thing when it keeps your application fast. I haven't benchmarked this in awhile so I could be wrong...but I can't imagine that string concatenation would be slower than loading an object-oriented XML interpreter

[Raffles]

Yes, that's very true, primitive is also fast. I hadn't thought of the performance hit of invoking the extension's engine, I guess it's only useful, like you say, for larger projects. Thanks for your reply.