Comments on: Rewriting the ASP.Net CSS Friendly Adapters – does anyone care?

By: brian

brian — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 03:14:09 +0000

Well, you guys inspired me enough to do it.

I’ll comment more on the ASP.Net forums.

By: John Dunagan

John Dunagan — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 20:52:47 +0000

Hi, Brian:

Sorry I came late to the party, but I already spewed on the indicated forum at ASP.Net. I’m gonna double-dip and say that yes, please, consider undertaking the effort. And I agree with Tokes whole-heartedly – this shouldn’t need to happen, but yet it does.

Just remember, three (responses) is a magic number.

I’m gonna work on this, too.

Cheers,
John Dunagan
President – SW Florida .Net Developers Group

By: brian

brian — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 01:10:28 +0000

I agree that the standard ASP.Net controls don’t render great markup. One very nagging point: If you use an ItemTemplate in many controls (using your own markup entirely) they still wrap your code in a TABLE. That sucks. However, I highly doubt the current rendering of the controls will change — partially due to the issue of breaking changes, and partially because I think “good enough” is probably good enough for Microsoft, at least in this area.

Wiring up events is the tough part (and an issue of the postback model more than rendering), which is why I wanted to separate HTML rendering from event wiring in the rewrite. Makes testing and isolating problems easier.

Interesting thought about modifying “small parts” of a control. However, that could be a complicated thing to implement. To do it, you’d need complex controls (such as a Wizard) render a well-defined (and well-documented) control tree which you can then modify before rendering. That being said, a complex control should work that way in the first place…

Your comment, combined with one reply to the original post on the ASP.Net forums, gives two responses. Not a huge compelling reason for me to undertake this effort, but I’ll leave the idea on the table if the need resurfaces, or if demand appears.

By: Tokes

Tokes — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 07:49:04 +0000

I’ve done quite a bit of work with the adapters and have a few suggestions that would make them more useful.

- the first point is that they shouldn’t even exist. The standard ASP.NET server controls should not be emitting such shocking HTML that for those of use trying to build accessible sites we have to consider re-writing them. So from the outset, spending time on the adapters does seem like a bit of a bandaid. But that aside, and assuming this won’t change…

- I built an adapter for the Wizard control a while back (on my blog) and one of the trickiest aspects was to get the events wired up correctly. You had to make sure you got the names of containers and their child controls exactly right otherwise nothing would work. This could be either more clearly documented or simplified.

- I’ve often looked at the output of a control and wanted to change one small aspect of it. This isn’t really possible with the adpaters – if you want to change one small thing you have to take on rendering, styles, events etc. for the entire control. For complex controls this is time consuming and error prone. I’d love to be able to control aspects of a control’s output.

- I agree with you, better documentation is a must.

My 2c.