I've been reading SAMS' Programming Data-Driven Web Applications with ASP.NET written by the two dudes that run dotnetjunkies. So far the book is thorough in the number of elements it touches and attempts to explain, but very surface level. "Here's widget A, here's a description B of widget A, here's an example code dump of me using widget A's closest cousin to 'Hello World!'."

That's not bad, but so far has had about 250 pages that have involved nothing more than skimming. I like a book with more tofu (trying not to offend anyone other than my own sense of taste, there), but it could be that I'm just that far along with my knowledge of ASP 3.0 and html that this is pretty much all old ideas.

Anyhow, the point of the post is that I notice these two dudes, who I often hold up as the representation of the archetypal higher-end ASP.NET programmer, have a bad habit of having 8 lines of asp.net code where one of html would do. For exmaple, here's what they do to place a name/title over top of a list of checkboxes:

<asp:Label
width="100%"
runat="server"
text="<center>Pick Products</center>"
BackColor="white"
ForeColor="Navy"
Font-Bold="true"
Font-Size="13"
/>

Why not just use <center>Pick Products</center>? Maybe couch in header tags? Backcolor is white over the whole page already... Anyhow, here's the code you get on the page:

<span style="color:Navy;background-color:White;font-size:13pt;font-weight:bold;width:100%;"><center>Pick Products</center></span>

At least MS uses css for the boldness, but shouldn't they double tag? (ie, use b tags in the middle) I don't know.

The big idea is that there are so many places for expressing personal preference in how html is rendered, I just can't imagine leaving it all up to MS. Even then, we're adding the "center" tag to this label's text attriubte. Seems wacked.

I also wonder about learning to add tags like the above with all these attributes defined within. That is, with codebehind you're supposed to be able to place all the code for a page in a page the web designer never has to see. Should this part of the code be for the web designer or shouldn't it? Shouldn't you just have a "label" there and let the web designer's stylesheet determine how it's displayed? Set/change the text and font, etc, in codebehind, and then only if you have to.

Phew, that was a poorly directed rant.

Oh yeah, my port of furthurnet to Mac OS 9 is coming along. No word from the devvers about my bug questions as of this morning though.