The htmlgen module is accessible via the formencode module.
This builds ElementTree nodes, but with some extra useful methods. (Open issue: should it use ElementTree more, and the raw Element stuff less?)
You create tags with attribute access. I.e., the A anchor tag is html.a. The attributes of the HTML tag are done with keyword arguments. The contents of the tag are the non-keyword arguments (concatenated). You can also use the special c keyword, passing a list, tuple, or single tag, and it will make up the contents (this is useful because keywords have to come after all non-keyword arguments, which is non-intuitive). Or you can chain them, adding the keywords with one call, then the body with a second call, like:
>>> print html.a(href='http://yahoo.com')('<Yahoo>')
<a href="http://yahoo.com"><Yahoo></a>
Note that strings will be quoted; only tags given explicitly will remain unquoted.
If the value of an attribute is None, then no attribute will be inserted. So:
>>> print html.a(href='http://www.yahoo.com', name=None, ... c='Click Here') <a href="http://www.yahoo.com">Click Here</a>
If the value is None, then the empty string is used. Otherwise str() is called on the value.
html can also be called, and it will produce a special list from its arguments, which adds a __str__ method that does html.str (which handles quoting, flattening these lists recursively, and using '' for None).
html.comment will generate an HTML comment, like html.comment('comment text') -- note that it cannot take keyword arguments (because they wouldn't mean anything).
Examples:
>>> print html.html(
... html.head(html.title("Page Title")),
... html.body(
... bgcolor='#000066',
... text='#ffffff',
... c=[html.h1('Page Title'),
... html.p('Hello world!')],
... ))
<html><head><title>Page Title</title></head><body bgcolor="#000066" text="#ffffff"><h1>Page Title</h1><p>Hello world!</p></body></html>
>>> print html.a(href='#top')('return to top')
<a href="#top">return to top</a>
See the source for more information.