Quote Originally Posted by kasracer
What do you mean by maintenance? If you mean automatic value population on post-back then asp and php can do this for you as well except that instead of everything being done for you in an IDE, you have to write a little script (or pop in one of the many popular PHP frameworks).
Expand on this - are those 'frameworks' or scripts not relying on values submitted to the same page either via form or querystring?


I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean. No matter what technology you use, you have to design the site and that design will work in any framework. It sounds like you're saying ASP.Net helps you to avoid making "hundreds of tweaks to make it look right" but that's not true as the design process will be the same.

I once took a site designed for PHP, took the template and threw it in an ASP.Net page and it worked just fine. I also had to do the reverse (ASP.Net -> PHP) to allow some designers to work on a linux server when testing the site. Unless the site is designed poorly, there shouldn't be any tweaks to make it look right because of the language. That just seems silly to me.
No, I wasn't talking about design in a visual sense, I meant "work right" instead of "look right" - in terms of functionality flow. One of ASP.NET's best features, obviously, is that it takes away a lot of housekeeping which one performs regularly as part of website creation and maintenance.


I don't think it's a purist statement at all and your idea of only HTML pages with one DIV seems silly.
It's subjective. You can say anything is against the way the web was meant to work. The web is what we make of it, after all. Flash, for example, was something that may not have been envisioned to be a large part of the web experience back then, but it is now. And the evolving standards are complying with this as we see from new specifications.

I haven't seen any non-ASP.Net sites do this in a very long time but I'll take your word for it. It's a bad user experience IMO no matter which framework it's run on.
You mentioned that "it can be done without" (sans quotes, paraphrased) - what did you mean? I think that's what's nagging you the most - you don't like the hidden field with the viewstate information in it, combined with the form submissions being performed to deliver functionality. So what were you talking about when you mentioned that it could be done another way?