June 19, 2003
The dull thud of the reality mallet.
Several kind souls responded to my question asking whether a mixed marriage between .NET and everyone’s favourite web standards would fly. While some of you simply wished me luck, others offered condolences at the unfortunate choice of development platform and related personal experiences of smacking heads against various walls. Still others giggled politely at my naïveté. To summarize the lot, I’m getting the distinct feeling that my quest for happy cohabitation may be in vain. Apparently, I’d have better luck getting Photoshop 1.0 to run in Classic under Jaguar. (Oh, wait a minute… that actually does work… but that’s another story altogether.) Talking more specifically, Dan Meeking did offer the following glimmer of hope.
"It’s been my experience that you are going to really blow standards if you are rendering "edit" controls on the page. If you are primarily worried about presenting information to users in XHTML, then I’d bet you can do it without a lot of hassle."
Unfortunately, Jeremy Harrington rammed a bulldozer into the front porch of that thought.
"I’ve been frustrated by the limitations that .NET web controls impose and how they can make conventional HTML & CSS design difficult. I’ve come up against in design after design. And the problem only gets worse when you start looking at the next release of Sharepoint. If you intend on taking advantage of the out-of-the-box .NET controls and development assistance I think you’ll have to sacrifice compliant XHTML and CSS. If you don’t take advantage of the controls, etc. then you start to move away from the value of the framework."
The frustrating part of this whole exercise is that .NET does generate some of the controls as seemingly compliant XML-ish code. But it’s certainly not consistent and there is no obvious way of controlling any aspect of the tag or attribute formatting. This isn’t exactly what I was hoping to hear, but I’m not giving up quite yet. If there’s a way around these limitations and constraints, I’ll find it.
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