Hi all,

Been an ASP developer for years and finally delving in to ASP.NET 2.0 with this book but one thing I'm finding that concerns me: Marco states (and other Wrox writers confirm here:http://p2p.wrox.com/blog.asp?BLOG_ID...rchTerms=XHTML) , that ASP.NET produces XHTML compliant markup. As far as I can see, a lot of the ASP.NET menu controls produce table based layouts which are definitely NOT XHTML compliant (tables should only be used for tabular data - never layout).

The question is - can this be remedied? Is there a way to customize the code outputted by these controls? Are there other controls that are "Microsoft Compliant" as opposed to just plain old compliant?

I look forward to plenty of future discussions here as I wind my way down the ASP.NET road!

Thanks in advance for your help

Regards

Bob:D

I never thought of tables vs CSS to be an issue relating to XHTML? Maybe this is the case, but I thought that XHTML was a standard talking about how to create HTML tags in a more XML compatible manner.

Layout is ASP.NET has always been a combination of tables and CSS. To make a pure CSS layout would be a lot harder, but definitely possible. But that's not how I would spend the next 3 months of my life - I don't see a payoff that would make it worthwhile.

The future after AJAX is still a bit murky, but I'd bet on a XAML compatible protocol in the future, which is starting out now as WPF/E. If this XAML is indeed the future of MS Web technology, then the layout issues we face today could be completely moot.

Is there anyone who would be sad to see these layout issues go away? XAML also has a form of stylesheets, but the difference is that HTML may go away, and therefore the question of tables would not be an issue.

Has anyone wondored why HTML got to version 4, and then quit? God knows it's not perfect, so there must be another reason nobody cares about moving it forward...

Eric

Your dreams have come true Mr. Fett, because of this:

http://www.asp.net/cssadapters/

You can do pretty much whatever the heck you want with them...the more I learn ASP.NET 2.0, the more I realize that questions like these have a resounding "Yes" answer. Not quite so with other server-side languages.

I think it'll be quite some time before a new markup language eclipses HTML though...no matter how halted HTML's development is.

How did the css adapters turn out as a solution?

you can see this for css vs tables:

http://www.hotdesign.com/seybold/index.html

the restrictions that visual studio 2003 places to xhtml were one of the reasons for I pass to visual studio 2005

Well you can force VS 2005 to markup that way (css and divs etc.) using the css adapters that I linked in my first post.