Today a discussion arose with one of the UI Designers on the ADF 11g project I work on. He is used to a certain way of styling web applications. He wants to work with ‘clean’ HTML – as little styling in it as possible, very W3C compliant and preferably structured – DIVs, ULs, … – in a way that makes applying external stylesheets very easy. He would like the HTML to contain values for the (style) class at specific points. And he will then take it from there.

While this approach is fairly common for Web Designers, it is not one that works well with most component based web frameworks, such as JavaServer Faces libraries. With JSP tag libraries and JSF components, web page developers have no direct control over the HTML that is rendered. Components provide productivity and help achieve consistency in source code and in look & feel. Typically this is seen as ample compensation for the loss of control over the exact HTML rendered. (more…)