Recently I got an optimization problem in ASP.Net.
To be short, I had a Repeater with custom (somewhat complex) template on my Page, and I wanted to reload it asynchronously.

The first solution was XP and didin’t consider performance at all: wrap Repeater inside an UpdatePanel.
The problem was that the entire Page had to be repopulated on server just to get to the Repeater.

That gave me a choice of two headaches:

1. Put all Page/Controls data into ViewState and bloat bandwidth.
2. Query all additional data on the reload request and increase load on database to get data that will be thrown away.

To be honest, I could solve (2) with server-side cache, but, in my opinion, caching does not make ugly solutions any better, just faster.

So, naturally, my thought was to query the data-only WebService and then populate the Repeater on client.

And it was interesting to find out that Microsoft already has a client-side data binding solution within ASP.Net AJAX Futures.
I have found an excellent article on this matter by Xianzhong Zhu, “Unveil the Data Binding Architecture inside Microsoft ASP.NET Ajax 1.0″ (Part 1, Part 2).

I will now give a quick summary on the overall client-side binding architecture.
In essence it is quite similar to the smart DataSource controls of ASP.Net 2.0:
There is a DataSource javascript component and a ListView javascript control with html template.
ListView passes data from/to DataSource control, and DataSource talks with a JSON Web Service as a backend.
Controls and their relations are described in text/xml-script (Futures-only feature).

Everything seems quite straightforward and easy to use, I was quite happy to find it.
One thing that bothers me is the performance of text/xml-script (it is parsed on client).
But it is a concern not related to the current story.
The other question is what to do when I want to databind a complex list (consisting of several embedded server user controls) ?
I am going to find it out real soon.

Along the way, I have also noticed Sys.Preview.Data also introduces DataSets/DataTables to javascript.
That is quite funny. Personally, I never really considered DataSets acceptable anywhere above Persistence layer.
But I already thought about Persistence/DataAccess concept in javascript when I saw Gears.
And DataSets seem to fit ‘nicely’ to some GoogleGearsDataSource (it would be quite an experience to actually see one in real code).

Well, javascript O/R Mapper, anyone ?

Since my previous post on microformats, I have decided that my opinion in this matter needs more evidence.
While I could collect all following information before writing the post, I didn’t have enough motivation to do the research.
But now, after writing it, I have my self-esteem as a motivation.

Ok, so I proposed using (namespaced) custom tags instead of overloading existing ones.
Now let’s go scientific and see what questions this solution may rise.

1. Do modern browsers support CSS styling for unknown tags in HTML documents?
2. Can these tags be added to document without breaking standard compliance (validity)?
3. What possible problems can arise from using non-standard tags in modern browsers?
4. …

For practical purposes, these can be converted into two main questions

1. Should custom tags work?
2. Do custom tags work in modern browsers?

And the answers are:

1. By default, no.
2. Not perfectly, but yes.

Now let’s discuss it in detail.

To understand the first answer is to understand what exactly is HTML, what is XML and what is XHTML.
The most important (maybe obvious) point is: HTML is not a subset of XML and HTML is not compatible with XML.
HTML and XML are both a subsets of SGML, and SGML does not provide a way to mix different subsets within a single document.
So custom XML tags are not allowed in a HTML document.

While there are some solutions that allow arbitrary XML to be placed in a HTML document.
For example, Microsoft has XML Data Islands.
But they can be considered grammar hacks due to XML-HTML incompatibility.

Practically, however, HTML documents have to be viewed as “tag soup” by the browsers, so custom tags do not cause document rendering to fail.

So, if I am formally out of luck with HTML, what about XHTML?
For simplicity, one can view XHTML is a rewrite of HTML to follow XML rules.
So any custom tags should be allowed in XHTML if they are properly namespaced.

But there are a lot of problems with authoring XHTML.
While some of them are more like challenges (script/style syntax), one is extremely important.
The only way to tell modern browsers that that the document is XHTML is to serve it as application/xhtml+xml
(See this document for an excellent explanation).
And Internet Explorer doesn’t support XHTML at all — so it refuses to render application/xhtml+xml.
(It doesn’t mean IE can’t open XHTML. When XHTML document is sent as text/html, IE renders it with HTML engine).
So I was out of luck once again.

At that point I understood the reasoning of microformats.
Standard compliance is an important part of better Web, and there is no completely valid way to use custom tags.

But what is with the second question? It seems that actual situation is way better than one could suppose.
Firefox, IE7 and Opera 9 all could render the custom tags style correctly in the document served as text/html.
(To be really pedantic, I set DTD and xmlns to XHTML.
After all, even if text/html documents are never parsed as XHTML, MIME Type is a server setting, not document one.)
But IE7 has a one important characteristic — it does not render custom tag styles unless there is an xmlns for their namespace on html tag.
No other tag is sufficient.

What does it mean? It means that while one can make a document that is styled correctly in these IE7,
document part containing custom tags can not be reused without providing a namespace on the aggregating document.
But it not an extremely important point, since for aggreagation one does not actually control styles as well.

So, practically speaking, one can create a document that uses custom XML tags for the cost of formal document validity.
(The document can still be made formally valid by using custom DTD, but this will put IE and FF into quirks mode).

By the way, the challenge of adding custom tags to HTML was faced by MathML (mathematical markup language) community for years.
If you are interested, you can read these discussions:

• Cannot render MathML — netscape.public.mozilla.mathml (2001)
• MathML-in-HTML5 — mozilla.dev.tech.mathml (2006)

Personally, I still see microformats as a step in wrong direction.
While hCard provides HTML with a way to express the vCard semantics, I would prefer it to be just a HTML-compatible way, not the recommended one.
I see HTML as standard that needs support, but not popularized extensions.

I really like what is happening to Web.

Cool-new-ajaxy sites are often actually more friendly, useful and powerful.
Web development seem to become way less hacky.
And a lot of standards that are gaining adoption are actually extremely useful (think about RSS).

But there is a group of new standards that I fail to understand.
They are called microformats.

In my understanding, there are three pillars of Ideal Web:

1. Markup provides semantics
2. Styles provide presentation
3. Scripts provide behavior

These blocks are logical, understandable, maintanable and loosely coupled.
It is worth noting that all strict DTDs are here to make the markup truly semantic and help achieve such separation.
This is why I write <strong> instead of <b>.
And this is what helps Web 2.0 applications to be really rich without being messy.

And for me, microformats are viral semantics.
They infect markup and overload it with additional meaning, turning it into an ill, bloated mess.
The microformats wiki states:

Reuse the schema (names, objects, properties, values, types, hierarchies, constraints) as much as possible from pre-existing, established, well-supported standards by reference

For me it seems more honest to say overuse, since the most interesting thing about microformats is that there are no actual problems they solve.
Consider this fragment:

<span class="tel"><span class="type">Home</span> (<span class="type">pref</span>erred):
  <span class="value">+1.415.555.1212</span>
</span>

I would prefer:

<tel><type>Home</type>(<type>pref</type>erred):
   <value>+1.415.555.1212</value>
</tel>

Now it does not seem that somebody is reusing iron to hammer nails.

It is 2007. XML is here and it is supported. X in XHTML stands for extensible.
IE did not support CSS namespaces, but you could write styles like vcard\:tel for years.
And this syntax does not seem like a show stopper to me.

Actually, upon reading on topic, I immediatelly googled for “microformats are stupid”.
The first thing I found was Why I Hate Microformats? by Robert Cooper.
He points to the same things I do, but he misses the fact that we had no need to wait for the IE7.

There is also a more interesting post Must Ignore vs. Microformats by Elliotte Rusty Harold.
The one point I do not agree is that Elliotte argues that XML does not have to be valid.
I do not see why the properly namespaced XML in XHTML would not be valid, but I will have to test it myself.

Web would be better if microformat authors read more about XHTML and did some browser tests before pushing this standard.