Generate any HTML tag with these two functions.

I was working on a form generation API on Typhoon PHP Framework today and came up with two wonderful functions for generating any HTML tag using PHP.

Here are the functions, enjoy!:

public static function tag($element,$attributes=array())
{
   $buffer = '<' . $element;               
   foreach($attributes as $key => $val) {
       $buffer .= ' ' . $key . '="' . $val . '"';
   }
   $buffer .= '/>';

   return $buffer;
}

public static function blocktag($element,$attributes=array())
{
   $content = $attributes['content'];
   unset($attributes['content']);

   $buffer = '<' . $element;               
   foreach($attributes as $key => $val) {
       $buffer .= ' ' . $key . '="' . $val . '"';
   }
   $buffer .= '>';

   $buffer .= $content;
   $buffer .= '</' . $element . '>';

   return $buffer;
}

Currently I use these in conjunction with Smarty helpers to create consistent markup across a project I'm working on. Any thoughts are appreciated!