Are ASP.NET Themes Worth The Trouble?

The debate of tables vs. divs has been waged on so many occasions that I feel discussing it is like beating a dead horse. I abandoned tables-for-layout four years ago and never looked back. I recommend you to do the same. Nonetheless, Peter’s recent post mentioned ASP.NET themes, which got me thinking.

I’ve never used theming support in ASP.NET. To me, themes are redundant and unnecessary. I think the cost of their maintenance is simply not worth it. The devil is in the details, and once you run into limitations of skins (and you will!), you begin chasing your tail. Instead of focusing on what you really want from your markup, you’re looking for yet another way to bend a rigid frame. Rigid frames don’t bend, they break.

Some features look good on paper, score talks at TechEd, fill chapters in books, but are useless in real life. If you want to do it right, stick to plain CSS files (maybe page-level or inline CSS rules here and there) and you’ll do just fine.

What about non-CSS properties on asp.net controls?

I agree. Themes are cool if you are new to design and you have no clue of what is really out there. Once one see's the light (semantic markup and CSS for presentation), there is no turning back.

Sebastien, in my opinion, having skins initialize control properties is even a bigger offense.

Think about it this way: a control is a class. Even though we're talking about presentational attributes, they are still class properties.

If you need a group of controls to have a common theme, my suggestion is to subclass from a control. At least you're preserving the "is a" relationship this way.

nice post!