Brennan’s Blog

I have put together a stylesheet for this blog which matches the previous designs that I have used in the past. What is different here is that I relying heavily on the stylesheet to control everything. The MovableType templates provide structural HTML with DIV tags with ID and CLASS attributes so that the CSS can be used to control positioning and the color and graphics.

In the last few months I have read up on using CSS with DIV tags. Books by Zeldman cover this topic very well. Zeldman also runs A List Apart which is a very helpful site which documents creative solutions to common issues for web designers and developers.

I am currently preparing for a project to produce a CMS product and I have been reviewing the issue of handling the page layouts with templating. This particular project will be done with ASP.NET in C# which will be a first for me. My experience up till this point has been limited to Perl, mod_perl and Java Servlets with JSP. So far I am finding that ASP.NET and the associated Visual Studio IDE has a high learning curve in terms of unique infrastucture.

With a background in traditional CGI programming I am very comfortable with the request and response life cycle of the HTTP transaction. When I went from Perl to mod_perl and then to Java Servlets, this metaphor was maintained. But with ASP.NET the metaphor has been replaced with this event model which tries to emulate a desktop application. My initial reaction is of disgust because it seems to fall along the lines of too many recent popular software movements, which have all made the basic technology more complicated that it needs to be.

With ASP.NET you create ASP.NET templates with ASPX documents with code-behind classes. Then there is the post-back concept which does not seem to make much sense with the old metaphor. And when events are triggered, I will want it to be handled differently with a different ASPX endpoint than where the page originated. And the VS IDE only reinforces this kludgy behavior.

So with this ASP.NET project I may either learn it is not so painfully mind-numbing as it seems, or I will find a way to revert the web transactions back to the classic request/response lifecycle which will allow me to ignore the baggage that this heavy platform is dragging along.