Web controls are a second set of controls designed with a different emphasis. They do not map one-to-one to HTML controls. Instead, they are defined as abstract controls in which the actual HTML rendered by the control can be quite different from the model that you program against. For example, a RadioButtonList control might be rendered in a table or inline with other HTML.
Web controls include traditional form controls such as buttons and text boxes as well as complex controls such as tables. They also include controls that provide commonly used form functionality such as displaying data in a grid, choosing dates, and so on.
Web controls offer all of the features described above for HTML controls (except one-to-one mapping to HTML elements) and these additional features:
At design time in HTML view, the controls appear in your page in a format such as:
<asp:button attributes>
The attributes in this case are not those of HTML elements. Instead, they are properties for the Web Forms control.
When the Web Forms page runs, the Web Forms control is rendered on the page using appropriate HTML, which often depends not only on the browser type but also on settings that you have made for the control. For example, a Button control might render as an <INPUT>
tag or a <BUTTON>
element, depending on its properties.
Detailed how-to and reference documentation is available for each control separately.
See Also
Web Forms Server Controls | HTML Controls | Web Forms Controls by Function | Validation Controls | System.Web.UI.WebControls Namespace