HtmlTextWriter: why do we need it and how is its performance?

[Rukmal Fernando]

Just rephrasing the subject...

Hi,

I had a lot of work to do in rendering a custom web control by coding it
using calls like

protected override void Render(HtmlTextWriter output)
{
output.Write(HtmlTextWriterTag.<tag>);
myControl1.Render(output);
...
}

Afterwards, I wrote a helper method so that I could build an HTML string
with placeholders for each of the controls and then tokenizing the HTML
string to write the HTML as a string and then calling the control's render
method.

eg: string HTMLString = "<TABLE>...{0}...{1}"
and pass it in like WriteHTML(HTMLString, myControl1, myControl2...);

This seemed to work ok, but now I'm wondering why the HtmlTextWriterTag enum
exists and whether my rendering html content as strings is sub-optmal.

If anyone knows how these two techniques execute, I'd be really grateful to
hear from you.

Thanks!

Rukmal.