Zeldman on ASP.NET WebControls: Half Right
Zeldman stating what everyone who uses ASP.NET in a halfway responsible fashion already knows: ASP.NET and the basic WebControls make it pretty close to impossible to generate valid markup. I'm a big Zeldman fan, but I will differ ever so slightly with him on one point. XHTML in and of itself is not a deal-breaker in 2003. Valid HTML 4.01 would be fine. Not that default renderings from ASP.NET will validate as 4.01, but they can be brought pretty close (ViewState and form@name are two issues I can think of off the top of my head, but you can write a module or filter and work around that if having those pop up in a validator invalidates your existence.) Then again, I view webstandards as more of a means to an end than their own end outright.
I won't pretend for an instant it would be nice to have XHTML right now and god save us if Whidbey doesn't generate nice tidy 4.01 and XHTML. But to say that ASP.NET has no value without explicity XHTML support is misguided, and I think you have to be on an upper floor of the ivory tower to say that it's default output equals is useless--it's just not where it should be. It's a shame there was little if any attention on this in area 1.1 (that I'm aware of).
Last point: mangled CSS? No idea what Zeldman's referring to there, possibly the fact that the VS.NET CSS editor is jive or possibly the actual CssStyle objects. I could see this as a problem, I just tend to be authoring css outside of VS.NET and keeping them fairly static (and my controls reflect this assumption, I'm not locking a bunch of style into their structure, I don't like that personally).
VS.NET drives me crazy, I can't learn to accept its mangling aspx files over and over again. You can turn all the options off, you can format your files and try and keep it tidy. I don't believe you'll win in the end unless you change file type handling to plain old text and hand code it all. Which to my way of thinking is better than reformatting your layout repetitively or working with a lot of disorganized and malformed crap all the way along. Like I've said previously, if Borland gets this right (and I bet they will) then it'll justify the $600 for their C# Builder IDE.
So to sum up, yes there is a really glaring problem right smack dab in the middle of System.Web. Zeldman's right about that. It's still a crime to throw out babies.