Francis Shanahan,
Why do you call partial postback as "nonsense"? This is the core feature of Ajax and has been utilized very well in Atlas framework and wonderful third party controls like Telerik
I agree to your point regarding the viewstate. But if developers are careful to disable viewstate, this can greatly reduce the size of the HTML which is rendered thus the page becomes light weight.
Only HTML Server controls are renamed in ASP.NET Web Form model and not pure html controls. Whatever it may be, why are you so worried if the renaming is done? I know you want to deal with lot of javascript events on the client side but if you design your web pages smartly, you can definitely get all the id's you want
Even ASP.NET Web Forms meets XHTML Standards and I don't see any bloating. This is not a justification of why we need an MVC pattern
Again, why are you bothered with AXD Javascript? Why does it hurts you? This is not a valid justification again
So far, i am a fan of developing applications using classic ASP.NET Web forms. For eg: If you want to bind a dropdownlist or a gridview, you need a maximum of 30 minutes and not more than 20 lines of code (minimal of course). But in case of MVC, talk to the developers how pain it is.
The biggest downside of MVC is we are going back to the days of ASP. Remember the spaghetti code of mixing up Server code and HTML??? Oh my god, try to read an MVC aspx page mixed with javascript, HTML, JQuery, CSS, Server tags and what not....Any body can answer this question?
