Any other choices besides ASP.NET for website Master Pages?

[Mike Pliam]

A great advantage of using ASP.NET to build a website is the use of a site master page. But I have found ASP.NET to be quite difficult to use, for example, positioning controls and content placeholders on the master page. Add the fact that there are very few good examples other than Scott Mitchell's which is rather limited, and I find that I can waste an enormous amount of time fooling with an ASP.NET site using VS 2008.

Of course, copying the same controls to every page of a site using HTML is a real pain in the ***.

I suspect that some clever person will devise a method to create a site-wide master page template using HTML that avoids the difficulties of the ASP.NET model, but I am uncertain if this has been accomplished as yet.

Is there another way to build a site-wide master page analogous to the ASP.NET master pages, using only HTML or some other language?

[Alsvha]

I don't know about other languages and outside the HTML include, I don't have any ideas for you.

But I'm somewhat intrigued by your statement: "But I have found ASP.NET to be quite difficult to use, for example, positioning controls and content placeholders on the master page" and I can't quite see what you mean.

Positioning server side or client side?
Master pages basically just work as a normal page and positioning in the same manner, and styles via style sheet etc.

It could be if you had questions about how to get your master page to work somebody here could help you, and you didn't have to find alternatives. Once you get your master page running, the rest should be easy enough. Master pages are a nice tool and I'm not even one that does front end programming all that much any more, but I still like them as well

[Mike Pliam]

I believe you are correct. After a all-night session, I was able to get a horizontal drop-down menu bar to operate as is should from a Master Page. The biggest problem that I have is getting the ContentPlaceHolder s to position and format correctly. I realize that this can largely be accomplished through the clever use of style sheets, but the learning curve is fairly steep.

Thanks for encouraging me to stick with master pages.