Are there any benefits to using HtmlTextWriter if you are not going to benefit from adaptive rendering?

Question

Outside of benefiting from Adaptive Rendering for alternate devices, does it ever make sense to write all of this code:

writer.WriteBeginTag(\"t         


        

Answer 1

Another advantage could be that using HtmlTextWriter one could format code in a cleaner (more maintenance friendly) way, and that HtmlTextWriter supports encoding HTML automatically. Compare:

writer.AddAttribute(HtmlTextWriterAttribute.Id, "someId");
if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(cssClass)) writer.AddAttribute(HtmlTextWriterAttribute.Class, cssClass);
writer.AddStyleAttribute(HtmlTextWriterStyle.Color, "Red");
writer.RenderBeginTag(HtmlTextWriterTag.Span);
writer.WriteEncodedText(text);
writer.RenderEndTag();

versus:

StringBuilder html = new StringBuilder();
html.Append("");
html.Append(HttpUtility.HtmlEncode(text));
html.Append("");

One may argue that the code in the second example can be written in a different, possibly cleaner, way, but this could be seen as an advantage of HtmlTextWriter because it basically enforces one canonical way of formatting (which again improves maintenance).

Edit: In fact, I actually made a mistake in the second snippet, and I needed to go back and fix the response. This confirms the point I wanted to make.