How then am I, a developer concerned about supporting and using standards and clean semantic markup supposed to apply them? The feeling I get from MS on this is that their official answer is “You’re not because we don’t want you to use them”.

Yeah the provider model in general, and the sitemap provider model especially is a great thing, I agree. But whether you are a professional developer, standards evangelist, or hobbyist developer, it doesn’t matter; if a control like the menu control is not emitting the appropriate markup upon being rendered in the browser then it isn’t doing anything to make web standards in general more accessible, acceptable, universally adopted, supported, or used by the internet community in general. Web standards aren’t just for professional developers anymore, they are for everyone <em>&strong>including Microsoft</strong></em>.

In fact controls like this not emitting the appropriate markeup when being rendered in browser are doing a lot to keep web standards down and are only serving to support Microsoft’s “We must be backwards compatible to version X, and support lousy coding practices or we’ll break the web” position.

Now some will most likely say “Well if that’s how you feel why not just embed your ordered list directly in your markup or master page and be done with it?” I can, I have and I sometimes do, but that doesn’t mean I like it because in so doing I lose all the great features databinding offers. Also, I shouldn’t have to be stuck with only doing that way, not if the control were appropriately designed to emit the appropriate code to start with. I feel that if you have time to build it wrong the first time, offer up patch, after patch, after update, then you had the time to build it right the first time so that it supported the current standards to start with.

And I mean lets face some facts here, from a design standpoint alone, which is more markup heavy and markup intense: a series of nested tables where each link resides in its own complete individual table, or a well structured nested ordered list. For my money I’d have to say the table is the more costly control and therefore the least appropriate choice for the job.

I just think they (MS) should actually focus on supporting established W3C standards first, rather than trying to create their own in their own image and forcing everyone to deal with it or else.

I completely agree that Microsoft has it’s head stuck in it’s “fourth point of contact”. There have been a bunch of people trying to pull it out for a while. My point was more that it’s finally starting to move.

The big challenge now is that the paradigm shift needs to occur over many teams. The IE team is on board and the Expression team is almost there. Also, if you look at some of the new features in VS 2008 and ASP.NET 3.5 there’s some headway on the platforms team too.

Keep in mind that there are 1000’s of developers and support staff involved with Microsoft’s web technology. Even if every single one of them is on board with standards, there’s a lot of inertia to get them moving.

If all goes well, I will post some tutorials on the new Silverlight stuff and a quick review/overview of Visual Studio 2008.

That would be A-W-E-S-O-M-E!

Take a look at something as simple as the menu control. It’s been blogged about, covered books, on sites like Sitepoint and A List Apart and yet MS Decides to make the menu control render natively as a table when it should arguably actually render natively as an ordered list. Sure there’s the control adapters but even these fall short. Add tot his that Microsoft themselves released several articles covering CSS and unordered lists being used to generate navigation, and how to the render their control natively? A table. What gives?

You miss the point of the menu control–it is to provide a very easy to deal with menu for the morts of the world to drop into their intranet apps, and evangalists to show in their demos. The real genius is the sitemap provider structure, which can be bound to any data control that can work with IHeirarchicalList, including the BulletedList.

For a more simple example take a look at the lowly hyperlink control. There’s no way to set an Access key on hyperlinks generated using thehypelink controls themselves much less on those contained in a Menu generated by a menu control.

What are you talking about? HyperLinks (and many, many other server controls) have an AccessKey property which, well, gives one an access key. Even if it did not exist, any unhandled attribute of an ASP.NET server control gets passed to the client output by default. So you could just add accesskey and carry on about your business.

Take a look at something as simple as the menu control. It’s been blogged about, covered books, on sites like Sitepoint and A List Apart and yet MS Decides to make the menu control render natively as a table when it should arguably actually render natively as an ordered list. Sure there’s the control adapters but even these fall short. Add tot his that Microsoft themselves released several articles covering CSS and unordered lists being used to generate navigation, and how to the render their control natively? A table. What gives?

For a more simple example take a look at the lowly hyperlink control. There’s no way to set an Access key on hyperlinks generated using thehypelink controls themselves much less on those contained in a Menu generated by a menu control.

Until Microsoft gets its collective head out of whatever fourth point of contact they have it in, little glimpses of hope that they’ll make an honest effort to support standards and work with developers is just so much smoke and mirrors.

http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2007/10/01/wds07-bonus-feature-chris-wilson-microsoft/