I'm going to reuse a sentence seen in ASP.NET 2.0 CSS Friendly Control Adapters description page in order to show to you what I want:
"ASP.NET is a great technology for building web sites but it would be even better if it provided more flexibility for customizing the rendered HTML"
That is, it is so powerful, but...
Yes, on the other hand it has a poor manner to show the HTML output for many of its web controls.
If we really want to speak about Web 2.0 concepts, we must know it is much more than a simple HTML output.
It includes mainly how good (how fast, how big in bytes, how clean in layout) the information should be addressed to who's going to be interested on.
In order to agree to Web 2.0's requirements many workers have to be in charge. It is not a easy task.
It could start when some Front-End Engineer who develops the first piece of HTML code. The point is that the Software Engineer who will be responsible to work on it will have to choose the best tecniques to make a design working as it is really suppose to be.
But if you think better, you can say it comes in second. Before start coding there is the most important step of Development (that's right?): Conception.
Here, the stakeholders have to decide what is important to the newest system.
Imagine the following scenario: your system was built as expected but a new update has just appeared:
you'll have to avoid "race conditions", much more performance, a design fully different never seen to anybody of your team!
Everyone is supposed to say: "it has got to be a joke!"
Unhappily it might happen easily.
Sometimes there is no need to develop or follow any pattern, process or guidelines. Everything has to be decided as soon as possible. What is riveting to some people can be depressing to others. So, there is no rule when you're going to use or not some patterns. Pragmatism should be used instead.
Backing to the main topic, due to the manner that .NET works sometimes is so hard to create an web site that follows all web 2.0 concepts. Its framework generates more than necessary; it puts its code in anywhere and so on.
In this site, I've tried to avoid that. I think these problems have been overcomed but it is still in progress.
It's important not make a connection between ASP.NET ways to work with the difficulty to make a site to web 2.0. It can be hard to be done by using any language or framework that you can think about.
On the next posts I'll try to explain what I've done in order to make a better HTML output. But I won't be speaking about HTML output only. I will be speaking about what's necessary to leave a web built with .NET closer to Web 2.0.
It includes presentation, technologies, components, techniques, process, and so on.