Recently reading some discussion of themes, and skins were listed as bad, because they cut out the designer and required duplication for any non-server control element.
As in the following: I want all my text input’s to have a blue background. So I said background=”blue” in an asp.net skin file, and create a blue style for any raw input tags that are created not using asp.net. Duplication. Duplication is bad.
The way I use this, is the following. Create a css class for that, and assign the class to asp:Textbox tags in the skin file. Now that same class can be used across server controls and plain ol’ html alike.
Why is the skin file still good? I didn’t have to specify a css class for everyone of my Textbox server controls…