Yet another thing that Hanselman and I disagree on. The problem is not HTML/JS minification. Everyone agrees that's a good thing, even though it effectively br

Yet another thing that Hanselman and I disagree on. The problem is not HTML/JS minification. Everyone agrees that's a good thing, even though it effectively breaks "view source". No, the problem I have is that he uses this to defend WebForms and the ViewState. Google has its own "WebForms" in the form of GWT, but that doesn't make WebForms any more OK. The problem with WebForms was that it was too far of an abstraction from the underlying HTML and Javascript underneath that developers spent more time working around WebForms than with it. That hurts the developer. The garbage that WebForms produces is not the same thing as minified HTML and Javascript, especially since the ViewState can bog down each request with extra data if you're not careful. Post backs aren't free in ASP.NET using WebForms and the ViewState. Regular HTML is not hard to develop for or debug, but WebForms makes it difficult enough to require a debugger. With regular HTML, you can develop with plain text and publish minified text so "view source" isn't broken during development.