The only explanation i can come up with is that it's more profitable to cheaply hack together new controls and start selling them than to take the time to do things properly. I have worked with infragistics for years, i have been to your training, i have used and skinned almost all of your controls and im just plain frustrated with it all.
My frustrations boil down to three things:
To get a very basic idea of the bloat issue take a grid control, bind it with a basic data on an otherwise blank page and view the resulting page source and you'll see what i mean, check out the page weight / file size from html and in fact do it with any controls. There's so much convoluded, unneeded and downright dirty code its dissapointing. Things like tables repeatedly nested inside each cell. I realise that there are scenarios where this is the only option but why not remove the overheads when those features aren't being used?
Maybe with the increase in consumer internet bandwidth its been taken as free reign to not optimise and streamline. Maybe i get the worst end of the problems because i work with UI design and skinning controls.
Jeff:
First let me say we absolutely hear you on this and we are actively working on the problem. Our biggest challenge is how do we change seven years of accumulated functionality without breaking all of our customers.
We think that one solution (in addition to continuing to look for optimizations in the current control set) is to start over from clean slate. I would encourage you to check our the work we are doing with our new Aikido framework and controls based on it. They are designed to produce much less markup and use much less JavaScript (only download what is needed based on the enabled features, and compress it all). I would love to get some feedback on those controls from you to see if you think we are heading in the right direction with Aikido, including the new WebDataGrid control.
http://ko.infragistics.com/aikido
BTW, the Aikido based controls are included as part of the basic NetAdvantage for ASP.NET product, no extra charge.
Devin