Is there any advantage to using literals over just piping the text to the HtmlTextWriter? I would think it result in less over head or are there good reasons for using literals?

Literals as in the LiteralControl control or the literal strings (either a string builder or a real literal string)? The only advantage of putting literal controls in the control collection is if you might add any control between the literal controls, then literal controls would be better.

If you are pulling strings from a string builder, this would be bad practice because the HtmlTextWriter has its own string builder tucked internally. If you are doing "real" literal strings, then this would be fine... however, not everything needs to be in strings - there is also the composite controls to pursue (which I did talk to you about in your other thread).

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-- Justin Lovell

Hi Justin,
Thanks for all your help just to fill you in on what I'm actually up to and how far I've got:-
I am writing a forum control, one control does the whole lot so that I can put mini forums on articles etc just by setting the forumID and MessageID. So far I've got Forum Category browsing with sub forums, Posts and thread display, Post New Message and Post Reply done.
The forms are generated by mix of output.write(HTML) and creating complicated controls (such as HTML editor) and using their renderControl method.
I have avoided needing to recreate the controls on postback to get their viewstate which is how I used to do it.
In relation to this question I am using Output.write("<P>Outputting HTML</P>") and just asked incase this was bad practice.

You've been a great help, thank you very much :o)