[thelist] Re: ASP.Net and web standards

[Ken Schaefer]

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From: "Bird, Graham" <Graham.Bird at rspb.org.uk>
Subject: [thelist] Re: ASP.Net and web standards


: Hi Ken,
:
: Not sure I like this "adaptive rendering". How does it work?
: Surely it puts a spanner in the works of anyone trying to design
: with contemporary HTML?
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The idea was to abstract the actual client from the code being used. You use
a standard set of controls to create an interface, and ASP.NET would work
out what needed to be done. For an uplevel rich client, you'd get all the
CSS, client-side script etc, and for a mobile device you'd get appropriate
WML (for example).

Obviously there are various issues with this type of thing (such as
rendering HTML v3.2 to Mozilla). On the plus side, everything is
customisable - you could edit some config files to redefine additional
browsers as "uplevel", or you could inherit and override methods in controls
to render things the way you want them to. Scott Mitchell has an article
about this on his 4guys website:
http://aspnet.4guysfromrolla.com/articles/050504-1.aspx

ASP.NET v2 will change a few things. There's a new "adapter" model where
various devices, or classes of devices can have their own adapters. A
standard set of controls can thus be rendered in numerous ways depending on
which adapter is used. This may obviate the need to rework some code for
proliferating client platforms. There's some information in the ASP.NET v2
beta quickstarts, eg:
http://beta.asp.net/quickstart/aspnet/doc/mobile.aspx

Cheers
Ken