Is it too naive to suggest using the view (or a pseudo view) to generate the html using erb? After all that is what erb is for. Colin
I am not sure exactly what you would do, I am also not sure exactly what you are doing with the xml. It just seems that an erb view is the ideal tool for generating html to be sent to the client. Is there a lot of xml or is it just a wrapper round the html? If only a wrapper then you could generate that ‘by hand’ so to speak in the erb file also, or in the layout file.
Can anyone else help? I do not really know what I am talking about here.
Colin
Does the html need to be an attribute? Or can it just be within an xml envelope? IOW, do you control the consuming end of this?
sorry more info on what it's used for would help, the xml is being read by google maps api so we can load html code inside the popup bubble.
so yeah we dont really control the consuming end 
thanks Marnen and everyone, do you know of any examples or something i can have a look at to get my head around it?
Todd Fox wrote:
thanks Marnen and everyone, do you know of any examples or something i can have a look at to get my head around it?
What's to get your head around? Just pretend your XML file is an HTML page, and proceed accordingly with your favorite template language (ERb, Builder, Haml, Markaby, whatever). There's no new concept involved.
Best,
Way to be appreciative of someone trying to help you. Good luck with that.
My bad MLK.