ASP.net reality check

The What, Why & How of web standards ASP.net development

ASP.net & designing with web standards (Zeldman aloud #2)

Still in overture mode I guess...

Spiralling Costs, Diminishing Returns

  • Some coding tricks (such as using nested tables for layout or font tags bloat our pages.
  • This swelling causes users to wait longer for our sites to download and increases our expenditure in hosting.
  • Having to code different versions of our site for different browsers and devices increases developing costs n-fold.

There's a very interesting catch here for us ASP.net people (actually this very same point could also be made of every other server-side technology, such as PHP or ColdFusion): a lot of this code excess is inadvertently created by some of the (seemingly simple) controls we use in our code.

An innocent ASP.net tag such as a grid can eventually result in a plethora of tables scattered all around. And yet, the extra price we're paying for all those tags can very easily go unnoticed. But I like ASP.net grids!. I'm not recommending solutions (yet), just pointing out risks and problems. Patience, dear reader, is quite singular a virtue.

Alan - yet another Aggiorno evangelist

Comments

Joe Chung said:

There are CSS Control Adapters for outputting ASP.NET controls in more standards-compliant ways.  However, I haven't really seen them take off anywhere that I've been.  It's practically abandonware at this point, which is sad.

# August 10, 2008 5:02 PM

acyment said:

Sad sad sad. I wonder what could be done to improve that situation...any ideas?

# August 12, 2008 2:41 PM
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