Mr Designer meets Mr Coder

Been working with a web designer lately, something I have never done before. Its been very interesting seeing the two worlds meet. Mr Designer is an expert in HTML and CSS but knows little about the ASP.NET world.

The interesting areas have been the line between ASP.NET Skins and CSS and ASP.NET controls rendering in tables. I have decided that Skin vs CSS is not so much which one is best more which is most suitable when. I found Skins very powerful with controls when we can set properties and found CSS great for lay out and styling of HTML controls.

Mr Designer is obviously keen to give me his CSS to apply to my site, but sometimes I needed to adapt this to work with my site. I had to set the CssClass on many controls to use with the classes in the CSS and sometimes had to take parts out and just use the Skins to set the styles on ASP.NET controls.

Its quite frustrating that many of the ASP.NET controls render in tables as these are HTML heavy and not as flexible as using DIVs to style. Scott Gu has an interesting post here about the CSS Control Adapter Toolkit for ASP.NET 2.0, which looks like it could be interesting in solving this problem. When I get a chance I will have a play :-)

I still think their is a big gap between a pure web designer and a developer. It will be interesting to see if the Expression Products with WPF will help to shrink the gap :-)