This is your HTML markup:
This is your HTML markup on drugs ASP.NET:
Any questions?
ASP.NET offers a lot of horsepower, especially in its most recent incarnation. I give you jQuery, AJAX, Dynamic Data, control adapters, and more.
But traditional ASP.NET web pages are littered with cruft: hidden fields, obscure Javascript, and a ubiquitous <form> element even on pages which don't look, act, or talk like forms. The ASP.NET WebForms infrastructure extracts a price. That price is the sanctity of your generated markup.
We could almost call clean markup the sacrificial lamb of ASP.NET WebForms development. It's what you give up in order to achieve the illusion of state in that stateless medium known as the World Wide Web. If you develop in ASP.NET, then you've probably spent a lot of time chasing your tail as I have, ferreting out how to clean up ASP.NET-generated markup to make it palatable:
- Reduce or removing VIEWSTATE and other hidden fields
- Relocate Javascript functions from the top of the file to the bottom
- Use control adapters to tweak generated markup of server controls
- Create customized HtmlTextWriters and hook them in to your page classes
- Override Page.Render and accomplish all kinds of mischief
- Apply regular expression replaces to your finished page output
But the problem with these hacks techniques is that they attack the symptoms, rather than the cause.
Dense, encrusted markup is the natural result of trying to graft a desktop application development paradigm (with events and easily recallable state and so forth) onto an inherently stateless, request-response medium: the World Wide Web. This is what ASP.NET tries to do, and that it succeeds at all (and it does succeed) is a testament to the ingenuity of the ASP.NET development team.
Still: the generated markup is ugly and loaded with boilerplate. There can be no arguing with this, although for most line-of-business applications, it doesn't matter. A little extra markup doesn't hurt anyone, neither in the transmission over the wire, nor when the Google spiders come crawling. (Although in some worst-case scenarios, unbridled viewstate has been known to grow to a few megabytes in size).
But if you're a stickler, a purist, or if you're building something that needs to be lean and mean, a typical ASP.NET WebForms application just doesn't give you the fine-grained control that you'll want—at least, not without a lot of extra work.
Enter ASP.NET MVC
You've probably heard about ASP.NET MVC by now (the official beta was released just a few days ago but the previews have been around for months) so I won't rehash.
Instead, I'd like you to take another look at that first picture, a picture of what HTML markup looks like in the land of Perfect:
When I see markup like that, well, in the words of Led Zeppelin:
Hey, hey, baby, when you walk that way
Watch your honey drip, cant keep away.
The above is actual markup generated by an ASP.NET MVC website. It's still ASP.NET—ASP.NET is now a superset which includes both the WebForms and the MVC paradigm within it—it's just not ASP.NET WebForms.
And it's clean. It's tight. It can be applied from the ground up, or grafted into an existing ASP.NET WebForms application. It's works with AJAX. You can still use server controls. You still have a design surface. Master pages. User controls. All that stuff still applies, if you want it.
But it puts you back in the driver's seat, rather than driving you around in the back seat. In the words of Scott Hanselman:
I like to think of ASP.NET MVC as the raw, acoustic version of the more heavily produced and multi-layered ASP.NET WebForms we use today.
Though when it comes to that, I like to think of ASP.NET MVC as more of an electric guitar, and you, the programmer, are the guy rocking out a Machiavellian riff with his shirt off, hair flying every which way, crowd-surfing, making love to the floor, whatever. And ASP.NET WebForms is the full 32-track 88-key digital production workstation with virtual instruments, effects, and those nifty little LED readouts.
But don't use ASP.NET MVC just because it's sexiest thing since sliced bread. Don't use ASP.NET MVC because it's what will get you the girls, even though I promise you it will. Use it because it works. It works so well that I've made a promise to myself and I hope it's one you can get on board with:
I will never again embed a form tag into a web page that's not intended to be submitted.
If that, if on nothing else, we should be able to agree.
Rock on?
Posted by James Devlin 31 comment(s)
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