Chapter 3: Controlling Your Development Experience
In This Chapter
Interacting with the user
Connecting to data
Using Stylesheets to make the site look better
Building and using User Controls
ASP.NET is a rendering engine. It takes preset batches of functionality and renders it into HTML. For instance, ASP.NET can take a database table and a little bit of layout information and make a nice, dynamic HTML table.
Rendering engines are a good idea in the web world. With a bunch of different implementations and versions, your rendering engine can produce different user markup out of the same effective code base.
ASP.NET does this well. You can tell it to make mobile-device markup and text-only markup and rich Internet Explorer markup from the same ASP.NET file, and it will do an okay job.
This is possible because of web controls. Web controls are controls that ASP.NET renders into client-side markup, like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Well-programmed controls protect the developer from the implementation details but can still do what is needed to be done when the time comes.
Web controls ...
