Iliad doesn't use any templating engine. Instead, it has a powerful API to generate HTML from Smalltalk code.

You don't have to worry about writing valid XHTML markup yourself. Using the powerful element API, Iliad will create XHTML tags, ensuring that tags are correctly nested, and close them for you.

For each HTML tag Iliad has a corresponding element class. Elements are composite objects which will be printed as HTML during the rendering step. ILElement is the root class of the element hierarchy. It provides necessary methods to other elements to print them in XML.

To build HTML pages, elements are added to each other in a tree. Each element represents an HTML tag and can have children. When the compositing step is finished, element are printed on a stream.

Example:

In this example, the root element of the method is named "e". We call its convenience method #h1:, which will add and answer an instance of ILHeaderElement. The other convenience method #a will add an instance of ILAnchorElement.

It will produce the following XHTML:

For each tag ILXHTMLElement provides a factory method to add the corresponding element to the receiver. These methods are named according to tag names (the same convention also works with tag attributes), and categorized under the 'adding convenience' method protocol.