Are there any view engines for ASP MVC that are 'designable'?

Question

Here's my problem:

I am disturbed by the "impedance mismatch" between what graphic/web designers actually produce, and what is needed by the standard ASP MVC view engine.

Basically there is no way to visually design a view i.e. the output of an action. No WYSIWIG designer. The only way to go from a static HTML design to an MVC app is by manually translating, and all the pain that brings.

What I have been dreaming of reccently is a view engine + designer tool that would let designers actually do their jobs, and for it to "just work" in the web app.

Something like what Blend does for WPF.

Yes, we had something similar in Web Forms but that had its own limitations and I still don't reckon it was usuable by most designers.

Surely a view engine + designer tool could be written, perhaps using a strict syntax (no abitrary code in templates), and allow the designer tool to mock your typed views and render dummy data for visualising output. And for designers to design an action - and have the tool indicate or breakdown the various visual elements on screen (sub views etc).

Tambratamburlaine

+1 I've been wondering the same myself... – Represent

Need the best of both worlds WbForms and MVC +1 – Heywood

Lack of any sort of standard in the View Engines will most probably keep designers away.. I would love to see someone answer this question – Heywood

ha! well lets see if someone in the world has given it more thought than me. if not i might even think deeper about how you would build it. for a start would need an extensible mainstream html editor - that is a challenge itself! – Tambratamburlaine

Answer 1

There is a rumour that Expression Web will support MVC...

Adjutant

interesting. no link to references though! I mean MS should be making something like this. I think its an obvious thing, I'm just surprised there isn't one already (perhaps on another platform) – Tambratamburlaine

Answer 2

Now that Lou DeJardin (creator of Spark view engine) has been hired by Microsoft I have a suspicion that this might be related to a new view designer... one that will work with Spark no doubt!

Fingers crossed.

Tambratamburlaine