[Sigia-l] ASP.net (was Designers and Developers)

[Nancy]

Thanks everyone for your valuable feedback - gives me lots of food for
thought.  By the way, checked out the Whidbey area of the ASP.NET site.  My
initial reaction: given that this is the main entry page for Whidbey, it
contains what I assume to be their "premier" design examples.  This in
itself was cause for concern...
http://www.asp.net/whidbey/Default.aspx?tabindex=0&tabid=1

It is obvious to me who "designed" them ;-)

Thanks again!


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Dimitri Glazkov" <Dimitri.Glazkov at gandalfdev.com>
To: "SIGIA-L" <sigia-l at asis.org>
Sent: Thursday, May 27, 2004 9:43 AM
Subject: RE: [Sigia-l] ASP.net (was Designers and Developers)


Nancy,

ASP.NET is an awesome framework for Web development and it offers a
wealth of capabilities and extreme flexibility for developers.

It also introduces a much more solid concept of code encapsulation,
which allows developers to move details of implementation to the
compiled code.

This concept was designed to provide a way to separate the function of a
page from its appearance -- your classic separation of content and
context.

Unfortunately, the watershed between those two was not drawn in the
right place. ASP.NET's entire rendering library was build on the notion
that library's rendering elements (Html and Web controls) simulate
actual HTML elements. More complex controls (such as DataGrid or
HtmlTable) may contain multiple nested tags. Each of these controls,
when rendered, emits actual HTML code.

Why is this wrong? Because the developers of controls now have a say on
what markup will appear on your page. And, as Chris correctly stated,
this means that the responsibilities of design and coding are getting
mixed up in all the wrong places.

If you had a chance to look at Whidbey, the upcoming new version of
ASP.NET, you will see this paradigm taken to new heights. In ASP.NET
2.0, there are built-in controls that inject hundreds of lines of code
into your page. Steve Ballmer may have said "Developers" 39 times in a
row, but I've yet to hear him say "Process" with the same gusto.

What should've been done is building the framework in such a way that
content is emitted in XML, which could be then shaped into desired
context using XSLT.

That way, we wouldn't have had to worry about mixing developer/designer
responsibilities.

Similarly, we wouldn't have had to worry about application developers
designing the presentation UI and HTML being hard-coded into the logic
of the software.

:DG<