Month: October 2003

it looks like somebody has written an inheritable framework for web controls that produce xhtml 1.0 strict compliant code. excellent! it’s only in beta but certainly a step in the right direction. they say they won’t be releasing source code, so i wonder how much they’ll be charging?

i went to the .net roadshow on wednesday and was suitably sold to by microsoft geeks. the new .net framework actually looks like a great development platform and visual studio is a rather nice coding environment. i just couldn’t get my head around microsoft’s claim to enable “cross-platform delivery”. yeah right – as long as it’s a microsoft platform.

and the code it spits out – ergh! it is such a shame – server side controls and the idea of coding behind pages are the best ideas to come out of .net and are on the path of enlightenment to separating logic from presentation (in much the same way as jakarta’s mvc framework that i’ve gotten so used to in struts). but the html code that things like asp:form tags spew out is ridiculous. microsoft sits on the w3c standards board and built .net from scratch but still can’t develop these controls to output valid html (let alone xhtml)! i guess this same company can’t build a compliant web page on their own site either so at least they’re consistent.

it looks like i’m going to have to spend a lot of unnecessary time overriding all server side controls using customized Render() methods to output what i want. not ideal. with any luck microsoft will listen to the development community and change this annoying “feature”.