Timl

Timl is an amalgamation of Tiny XML. I created it because I find the builder DSL to be a little bit cluttered and hard to digest at first glance.

Timl aims to be very small and very intuitive to use. The main code that does all of the heavy lifting is less than 100 lines of code, including comments.

Build statuses

Develop:

Master:

Installation

The installation is a standard RubyGem installation:

gem install timl

Usage

The Timl DSL is very intuitive. It relies on some Ruby metaprogramming under the hood that will catch methods that have not been defined and define them. What this means to you, the user, is that you can use any XML tag you want as part of the DSL. Let's see an example:

require 'timl'

Timl.start do
  body do
    p { "This is a paragraph tag." }
  end
end

The return value of that code is the following XML:

<body>
  <p>
    This is a paragraph tag.
  </p>
</body>

Which is what you would expect, right?

Attributes in XML

The above example is a bit simple. What is you want attributes in your XML? Timl can do that too:

require 'timl'

Timl.start do
  div id: "content" do
    p style: "font-weight: bold" do
      "This is a bold paragraph."
    end
  end
end

Which, unsurprisingly, produces the following XML (I realise these are HTML examples, but the library really isn't constrained to HTML):

<div id='content'>
  <p style='font-weight: bold'>
    This is a bold paragraph.
  </p>
</div>

XML and HTML headers

If you want to include XML and HTML header/doctype information, that's possible as well:

require 'timl'

Timl.start do
  xml_header
end

Translates to:

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>

If you want to use a different encoding, that's possible too:

require 'timl'

Timl.start do
  xml_header encoding: "UTF-16"
end

Translates to:

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-16'?>

HTML doctype

The HTML doctype is inserted in a very similar way:

require 'timl'

Timl.start do
  html5_doctype
end

Translates to:

<!DOCTYPE html>

Unfortunately doctypes before HTML5 are not currently supported. If there's overwhelming need for it in future, I might consider adding it.

Contributing

If you want to contribute, please feel free. File an issue, fork the repo, submit a pull request, whatever you want to do. Please not, however, that I use git-flow as a branching strategy. If you aren't familiar with git-flow, look it up, learn it, love it :)

Please don't submit pull requests to master. Pull requests must go to develop and come from a feature branch. Thanks!