ASP.NET for Designers

I’ve just noticed a section within MSDN entitled ASP.NET for Designers. It was a pleasant surprise to see a lengthy article by Stephen Walther, Building ASP.NET 2.0 Web Sites Using Web Standards. In this remote corner of MSDN you will also find several design templates to jump start your new commercial or personal web endeavor. The templates claim standards compliancy, adherence to Section 508, dedicated print style sheets, and other goodies.

This is definitely good progress.

Good progress indeed. Especially considering the recent uproar in the standards community over the Disney Store UK re-design. I don't know if it was mentioned much, but the site (at the time) was a boilerplate VS 2003 site built by some oblivious developers, with all the useless MS tags, and ugly markup. It's improved slightly since Molly's post though, so at least they're working on it.

I know how painful it is to do standards based development in 1.1/VS 2003, so this is a great step. Thanks for your site too, I've found lots of helpful resources here.

I noticed some of the templates use the MS menu control which puts out some pretty nasty code. I had trouble getting the CSS to validate since it outputs some in the page head and doesn't follow best practices of also specifying a foreground color when specifying a background color. Not to mention the menu is rendered with tables instead of as an unordered list.

The new ASP.NET Menu Control is a "templated" control so the developer CAN control exactly what HTML is emiited by it. I've already used it to emit an unordered list. Then by skinning the control to point to the correct CSS it works just like the hand-coded UL menu. Also it's linked to a multi-level dynamic site map allowing me to put the control in a MasterPage which acts a template for all new pages. Beats the daylights out of doing a UL menu on every page.