--- html.py.orig1	2003-11-24 20:48:58.000000000 -0500
+++ html.py	2003-11-30 10:38:22.000000000 -0500
@@ -69,12 +69,54 @@
 
 ValuelessAttr = ["valueless_attr"] # magic singleton object
 
-def htmltag (tag, xml_end=0, css_class=None, **attrs):
-    """Create a HTML tag.
+def htmlattrs (**attrs):
+    """
+    Return a dictionary suitable for passing as the keyword argument
+    dictionary to htmltag().  Trailing underscores are stripped
+    to allow use of Python keywords (specifically, 'class') as
+    arguments (hence HTML tags).  Also, all attribute names are
+    forced to lowercase.
+
+    For example,
+      htmlattrs(href="http://google.com",
+                title="A nice search engine",
+                class_="link",
+                onClick='alert("ouch!")')
+    returns the dictionary
+      { 'href': 'http://google.com',
+        'title': 'A nice search engine',
+        'class': 'link',
+        'onclick': 'alert("ouch!")' }
+    """
+    d = {}
+    for attr in attrs:
+        d[attr.rstrip('_').lower()] = attrs[attr]
+    return d
+
+def htmltag (tag, xml_end=0, **attrs):
+    """
+    Return a string with an HTML tag and various attributes.  Does
+    nothing about the corresponding end tag, unless 'xml_end' is true,
+    in which case a valid XML-style "<foo ... />" tag is produced.
+
+    Keyword arguments to this function become HTML tag attributes, eg.
+      htmltag("img", src="foo.gif", alt="Picture of a foo")
+    returns
+      '<img src="foo.gif", alt="Picture of a foo">'
+    Note that keyword args are transformed into tag attributes in hash
+    order (ie. unpredictable and subject to change across Python
+    versions).
     """
     r = ["<%s" % tag]
-    if css_class is not None:
-        attrs['class'] = css_class
+
+    # This is for backwards compatibility with code that predates
+    # the htmlattrs() function above.  (However, special treatment
+    # of 'css_class' only appeared in Quixote 0.7a1, so it could
+    # probably just be removed without great harm.)
+    if 'css_class' in attrs and 'class' not in attrs:
+        attrs['class'] = attrs['css_class']
+        del attrs['css_class']
+
     for (attr, val) in attrs.items():
         if val is ValuelessAttr:
             val = attr