A friend of mine asked me an interesting question today. The conversation started out something like this.
(The names have been changed to protect the innocent)
Friend: hey brendon - simple question for you if you got a sec?
Me: sure thing
Friend: Do Html controls (as opposed to WebControls) participate in viewstate during a postback?
Me: (good question)
I told him I was pretty sure of this and that, but I did not have documentation offhand to prove anything.
He brought up a good point: The only reason he questioned whether HTML controls do participate in view state is that it has been drilled into everyone’s head that Html* controls are less overhead than UI.Web.* controls and so he assumed the lack of viewstate would be part of that.
In the end he just wanted to be sure how they would work for the companies using his code.
Let me know what you think and I will post what we came up with.
--Brendon Schwartz