By Scott Mitchell
Introduction
Traditionally, developers using Web controls enjoyed increased productivity but at the cost of control over the rendered markup. For instance, many ASP.NET controls automatically wrap their content in
for layout or styling purposes. This behavior runs counter to the web standards that have evolved over the past several years, which favor cleaner, terser HTML; sparing use of tables; and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for layout and styling. Furthermore, the
elements and other automatically-added content makes it harder to both style the Web controls using CSSand to work with the controls from client-side script.
One of the aims of ASP.NET version 4.0 is to give Web Form developers greater control over the markup rendered by Web controls. Last week’s article, Take Control Of Web Control ClientID Values in ASP.NET 4.0, highlighted how new properties in ASP.NET 4.0give the developer more say over how a Web control’s ID property is translated into a client-side id attribute. In addition to these ClientID-relatedproperties, many Web controls in ASP.NET 4.0 include properties that allow the page developer to instruct the control to not emit extraneous markup, or to use an HTML elementother than
.
This article explores a number of enhancements made to the data Web controls in ASP.NET 4.0. As you’ll see, most of these enhancements give the developer greater control overthe rendered markup. Read on to learn more!
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Anand Narayanaswamy is the editor-in-chief of Learnxpress. He was a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for a period of 9 years. He is a ASPInsider based in Trivandrum, Kerala State, India. Anand is the author of Community Server Quickly published by Packt Publishing.
