Hey. We're building a large ASP.NET website, and have hired an external firm to do the design (CSS + protoype pages). In fitting the design to the page, we've found a number of problems that indicate ASP.NET's workings were never considered. My question is - Is there a common standard (that should be) used by design firms creating what will become an ASP.NET site?
We've found things like:
- Using IDs on HTML elements for CSS/JS to find, which doesn't work with server tags generating IDs.
- IDs with hyphens in them
- ValidatorSummary example built in a completely different style to ASP.NET's.
- Assumptions that all buttons will be <input> tags
- Margin styles on <div>s, interfering with our use of panels
The first instance is a problem. The rest are inconvient misunderstandings. As usual, there are intense time constraints, so in this sea of 'we'll fix it / get our designer to look at it / work around it', I'm largely hoping there's some fundamental building block that would have stopped most of these problems from happening.
The design firm is large, with a substantial body of large-site work behind them, so sadly the 'don't hire a one man shop' wisdom isn't the ticket in this case...
[Update]
If you're in the position of hiring an external web design firm, and have the luxury of early collaboration and wish to help bridge the gap of meeting ASP.NET's requirements, here's our current list of guidelines. Please comment below if you feel there's something that should be added:
- Please encapsulate each the page in a <form> tag (ie.
place it directly after the
<body> tag), and use no other
<form>tags on the page To display a summary of page validation errors, please cater to rendering the following format example:
<div class="error_class">
<h3>Please review the following fields</h3>
<ul>
<li>Home phone number</li>
<li>Surname</li>
</ul>
</div>- Please avoid driving styles off the ID or name property.
- If there are HTML components that need to be turned on and off, these components should be encapsulated in a
<div>element, so that the div's visibility can be set to 'false'. - If styling buttons, please cater to both
<input>tags and<a ... class="example_class"><span>Button text</span>` formats. - Avoid setting attributes on class-less
<div>and<span>tags. - Thank you for bearing with us.