I’ve heard many people talk about how Webforms have problems, that the problems stem from being a leaky abstraction. I tend to agree, but I could never communicate the problem as succinctly as Jeff Perrin just did.
Now the first problem with Webforms is not that it’s an abstraction, or even that it’s a leaky one (they all are). The problem is that what Webforms attempts to abstract away is actually simpler than the abstraction!
The more I think on this the more it blows my mind! When you look at Html over Http and even CSS and JS, the whole system is REALLY SIMPLE! Maybe too simple, yes, but that is for what various helpers like Yahoo’s UI library are. Of course, I found this link while reading Ayende. 🙂