ASP.Net is great but many of the controls use table tags when they render. I am currently in the process of developing some Internet sites using MOSS 2007 which need to meet accessibility guidelines so these controls, in their out of the box state, are no use to me. We have tried applying the CSS adapters that get rid of the tables but this also had the effect of removing tables from the site settings screens making them difficult to use.

The solution we are going for is to create new controls that inherit from the base control. The new control then overrides the render event to remove the non-compliant tags and replaces them with compliant ones.

We are also using this method to add script to the master pages which removes table tags from web part zones etc.

DISCLAIMER - I have created a non-tabular control for the SPGridView. You could argue that the SPGridView presents tabular data so does not need any changes to the rendered HTML, you would probably be right but this example shows what can be done. :-)

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;
using System.Web;
using Microsoft.SharePoint;
using Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls;
using System.Web.UI;
using System.Text.RegularExpressions;
using System.IO;

namespace XHTMLCompliantMOSSControls
{
    public class CompliantSPGridView : SPGridView
    {
        protected override void RenderContents(HtmlTextWriter output)
        {
            //get the rendered HTML
            StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
            StringWriter sw = new StringWriter(sb);
            HtmlTextWriter hw = new HtmlTextWriter(sw);
            base.RenderContents(hw);
 
            //remove tables
            string str = sb.ToString();
          
            str = Regex.Replace(str, "<table[^>]*>", "<div class=\"mainSPGridView\">");
            str = Regex.Replace(str, "<tr>", "<div class=\"normalSPGridView\">");
            str = Regex.Replace(str, "<tr class=\"ms-alternating\">", "<div class=\"alternatingSPGridView\">");
            str = Regex.Replace(str, "</tr>", "</div>");
            str = Regex.Replace(str, "<td[^>]*>", "<div class=\"itemSPGridView\">");
            str = Regex.Replace(str, "</td>", "</div>");
            str = Regex.Replace(str, "<tr class=\"ms-viewheadertr\">", "<div class=\"headerSPGridView\">");
            str = Regex.Replace(str, "<th class=\"ms-vh2-nofilter ms-vh2-gridview\" scope=\"col\">", "<div class=\"itemSPGridView\">");
            str = Regex.Replace(str, "</th>", "</div>");
          
            output.Write(str);
        }
    }
}

If you then apply a bit of CSS using the classes that have been added it is possible to get it looking just like the tabular SPGridView.

This approach could be used with any server control to make it compliant with XHTML.