Optimized Rendering and Skins for RadCalendar for ASP.NET AJAX

I have the pleasure to announce that RadCalendar for ASP.NET AJAX has undergone a considerable HTML and CSS optimization.

As a result, the HTML output generated by the following RadCalendar declaration has dropped from 5,916 bytes to 3,905 bytes, or by 34%.

With regard to CSS, RadCalendar has now moved to Telerik's current naming convention for CSS classes, namely - the skin name is carried only by the control's wrapper, thus making all other CSS classes a lot shorter. In addition, the distribution of CSS classes across HTML elements has been modified, so that the control is more flexible in terms of CSS styling.

Finally, the best thing is that each embedded RadCalendar skin now uses ONE image for all its graphic content (including the date and time pickers' popup buttons) due to the utilization of CSS sprites. In this way, one skin needs only 2 HTTP requests (1 CSS file and 1 GIF file), while until present the number of requests was at least 10.

Of course, while rewriting all the embedded skins, we fixed all visual glitches, related to browser inconsistencies, content "jumping" while navigating to another month, etc.

All the above improvements will be introduced in our Q3 2008 Beta release (a.k.a. "Futures"), which will be released quite shortly.