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 <table> 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 <table> elements and other automatically-added content makes it harder to both style the Web controls using CSS
and 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 4.0
give 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-related
properties, 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 element
other than <table>.
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 over
the rendered markup. Read on to learn more!
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