Do you have any examples of Web Forms applications with clean/semantic markup and lightweight AJAX? From my experience it may be possible but all the purported

Do you have any examples of Web Forms applications with clean/semantic markup and lightweight AJAX? From my experience it may be possible but all the purported advantages of ASP.NET - drag and drop development, not having to understand how the web works, rapid development, go out the window if you're trying to achieve clean, lightweight markup, and you spend lots of time trying to work around the framework instead of having it do things for you. If a framework encourages you to build bloated and ugly web applications (even though it's possible with a lot of effort to build nice ones), it's not a great framework. Just like how McDonalds will make you bloated and slow and sick - it's not great food. But I can agree that the ASP.NET platform is nice - without web forms.