That's not the worst idea in the world, but it looks like it expects your python code to walk the whole html tree, and it's very much mingling of logic and markup. The great thing about wicket (well, one of many) is that your markup is inert html files, and you can put reams of static content in if you want, without cluttering up the actual code. Your component hierarchy has to match your html hierarchy, but not every tag needs a component; you just need to make sure A is a descendant of B in markup (with no other components in between) whenever A is a child of B in code.