Add Utility to allow conversion from Panel (or Component) to html String

I think it would be useful to add a utility class/method to convert from a Panel or Component to its markup String. There are at least 2 very valid use cases where doing this makes sense:

1. You are trying to create an html email to send out to your customers. Building that content out with wicket is a great way to do it. We are able to harness Wicket's awesome i18n capabilities to generate the content. Otherwise, we resort to ResourceBundles or having to introduce some other templating library.

2. Many Javascript APIs/JQuery Plugins (i.e. growl notifications, popovers, etc) want the html content passed in. Again, ideally the component is written in wicket and we could use the utility to convert it to a String.

The blog post below (thanks Cedric!) suggests a way to do this, but I think it would be helpful to be included in the wicket framework. What do you guys think?

http://www.bloggure.info/work/java-work/use-wicket-templating-system-to-generate-html.html

Original email thread: http://markmail.org/message/fnkwjuh3xdekepvi