Assuming these are genuine and not the world's longest rhetorical questions: 1) There is nothing wrong with your approach. There is nothing that can be done us

Assuming these are genuine and not the world's longest rhetorical questions: 1) There is nothing wrong with your approach. There is nothing that can be done using ASP.NET MVC that cannot be done with the ASP.NET Webforms pattern (I'm not sure if there is a generic term for the single-file pattern that classic ASP, JSP, AOLServer, etc use). You are smart and working alone, and quite likely the innovations in your application will not be made in the way in which you concatenate strings to generate HTML. 2) Again, you are not missing anything by using your years of experience with KEdit and Rexx, except possibly a job working on internal HR applications at an insurance company. Intellisense and VWD are tools designed for programmers with a range of experience to be productive enough so as not to be a net loss for their team. I make websites with ASP.NET MVC and use Visual Studio to do it. Would I consider KEdit? Probably not--I lack your experience with KEdit, and when I want to deal exclusively with text I use Emacs. And why use intellisense? Your method of creating abstracts for the .NET class library is a great one, and one that a lot of people could learn from. But that is not reality in the everyday .NET development world. Intellisense allows those developers to navigate both the .NET libraries and their teammates' ad-hoc classes. 3) I'll pass--I didn't watch the video. 4) Almost certainly the text box was generated as an example. It's possible that most sites using javascript nowadays do so only because yet other sites use javascript. But where javascript is used well it is indispensable. Part of the original appeal of both Google Maps and Gmail was the pleasant user interface enabled with javascript. If your site is a means to an end and the users are willing to put a lot of effort into the result--say, as an extreme example, a form that takes some account information and literally gives the user money--there is little you could gain from javascript. But if you want to do what you can to make a user's experience a pleasant or even delightful one, javascript is frequently the best way to achieve that.