Handling XML output in a slim way

Hi, up until now, when outputing XML I've been constructing the output as a continous string-soup in such ways like [...] $xml .= printf('<item name="%s">%s</item>', makeXmlSave($name), makexmlSave($contentOfItem)); [...] makeXmlSave() makes sure that quotes, ampersand, < and > are properly escaped with their entity reference. However I was thinking if it wasn't possible to e.g. generated a a complete DOM tree first and then just having this tree being dumped as XML. I'm using PHP4 right now. thanks, - Markus