Web Forms offer two types of Server Controls. The first is server -side HTML controls . These are HTML controls that you tag with the attribute runat=Server. Although these work, we won’t spend time on them in this chapter.

Instead, we will focus on ASP.NET Server Controls^[13] that Microsoft designed to augment and replace the standard HTML controls. Server Controls provide a more consistent object model and more consistently named attributes. For example, with traditional and server-side HTML controls, input is not handled consistently:

    <input type="radio">
    <input type="checkbox">
    <input type="button"><input type="text"><textarea>

Figure 19-7. Switching between design and source tabs after adding a radio group

Each input type behaves differently and takes different attributes, and text is handled with different types of controls depending on whether you want a single line or multi-line input. The Server Controls try to use attributes consistently. The Server Controls that correspond to the preceding HTML Server Controls are as follows:

    <asp:RadioButton>
    <asp:CheckBox>
    <asp:Button><asp:TextBox rows="1"><asp:TextBox rows="5">

When you use the Server Controls, ASP.NET translates them into ordinary HTML before sending the page back to the browser. What is seen on the browser is always industry-standard HTML and will run on virtually any browser by any manufacturer.