Which Method Do You Find More Readable To Output Dynamic HTML?

Question

I'm imagining that this will come down to personal preference but which way would you go?

StringBuilder markup = new StringBuilder();

foreach (SearchResult image in Search.GetImages(componentId))
{
    markup.Append(String.Format("<div class=\"captionedImage\"><img src=\"{0}\" width=\"150\" alt=\"{1}\"/><p>{1}</p></div>", image.Resolutions[0].Uri, image.Caption));
}

LiteralMarkup.Text = markup.ToString();

Vs.

StringBuilder markup = new StringBuilder();

foreach (SearchResult image in Search.GetImages(componentId))
{
    markup.Append(String.Format(@"<div class=""captionedImage""><img src=""{0}"" width=""150"" alt=""{1}""/><p>{1}</p></div>", image.Resolutions[0].Uri, image.Caption));
}

LiteralMarkup.Text = markup.ToString();

Or should I not be doing this at all and using the HtmlTextWriter class instead?

EDIT: Some really good suggestions here. We are on 2.0 framework so LINQ is not available

Answer 1

Another vote for "AppendFormat". Also, for the sake of the server code I might put up with single quotes here to avoid the need to escape anything:

StringBuilder markup = new StringBuilder();

foreach (SearchResult image in Search.GetImages(componentId))
{
    markup.AppendFormat(
        "<div class='captionedImage'><img src='{0}' width='150' alt='{1}'/><p>{1}</p></div>", 
        image.Resolutions[0].Uri, image.Caption
      );
}

LiteralMarkup.Text = markup.ToString();

Finally, you may also want an additional check in there somewhere to prevent html/xss injection.

Another option is to encapsulate your image in a class:

public class CaptionedHtmlImage
{  
    public Uri src {get; set;};
    public string Caption {get; set;}

    CaptionedHtmlImage(Uri src, string Caption)
    {
        this.src = src;
        this.Caption = Caption;
    }

    public override string ToString()
    {
        return String.Format(
            "<div class='captionedImage'><img src='{0}' width='150' alt='{1}'/><p>{1}</p></div>"
            src.ToString(), Caption
          );
    }
}

This has the advantage of making it easy to re-use and add features to the concept over time. To get real fancy you can turn that class into a usercontrol.