JoeAudette.com

In my previous post about achieving XHTML compliance in mojoPortal I took some heat from some keen observers of the markup, but the markup in question was that rendered by the ASP.NET server controls specifically the ASP.NET Menu control.  Since then I have done even more work to clean up the markup I do have direct control over and trying to do good CSS layout with a minimum of non-semantic markup. The more I got my markup cleaned up the more the ASP.NET Menu was bothering me. It renders as a hideous set of nested tables in the current version to be blunt about it. I've been pondering the idea of building my own menu control to make it render with ul and li tags but I already have so much to do with trying to get things setup for WebParts I've been thinking the menu would have to wait or maybe someone else would come up with one.

Today after reading Scott Guthrie's post of things coming in April it seems my wish will come true. A lot of great stuff is coming but what really caught my eye was the mention of CSS Control Adapters which allow you to override the default rendering of the server controls. They are specifically releasing some example CSS Control Adapters that render the Menu and TreeView controls as ul and li elements complete with source code!

Things just keep getting better in the ASP.NET world!