I used to see a lot of posts discussing the merits of html vs. ascx skinning but not so much anymore.  Has everyone just decided to do work in html?  There are many very good resources for html skinning, my favorite is the DNNCreative site.  I have never seen a tutorial on ascx skinning.  I know you cannot just open the ascx file in visual web developer and I have seen posts saying that you have to have a working site to work on but I have never seen a list of the steps you need to do to setup skinning that way.  Sometimes the html method just seems a little cumbersome and I was hoping for something a little more streamlined.

Any thoughts?

Thanks,
Bill

Please ignore my last post referencing aspx file extensions.  Low blood sugar...

While reading the skinning document again, I noticed a feature that may be able to speed up the html process.  Can anyone expand on this from the skinning doc file?  It says to copy the package to the appropriate application directory.  Does this mean the install/skin folder?
 

XCOPY Deployment
In DotNetNuke 3.0, a new feature was added which allows you to deploy a skin or
container at the host level without having to login to the application. This is useful in
scenarios where you are a Hoster and wish to provision a client account with a new skin,
or possibly you would like to upload your skin via FTP rather than through the user
interface, or perhaps you are developing a new skin and wish to test it locally. In order to
use this feature, must copy your skin or container package file ( *.zip ) to the appropriate
application directory. The application will immediately recognize the file and execute the
necessary installation routine.

The main reason for doing skinning in HTML is to ensure that what you finish up with is easily upgradable. So as you move to DNN5, DNN6 and so on, the parser translates it intelligently based on the DNN version. We still have some DNN 2 skins that work more or less well in DNN5 beta. This cannot be said about Ascx skinning. I appreciate that it may be easier for a coder to do it in ASCX, I hear that they keep telling me that we just press F5 to see the changes - true but for us the best application is still Dreamweaver. Point it to your portal running IIS so you see it in local host - do your changes in html in dreamweaver, You need two browsers looking at the site. one you are logged in as admin another as user. the one you are logged in as admin - open admin/skin and you can parse then seethe result of your changes in the browser that you are not logged in as admin. This approach is still one step more than just F5 but the result is much more robust than an ASCX skin in the long run.