RadNotification...peering into the future?

Ok so clearly KendoUI is teleriks new HTML5 baby, but right now we’re talking asp.net ajax futures.

So upon initial inspection RadNotification is pretty neat right…allows you to display a popup message somewhere on the screen whos content is set via webservice, callback, or markup…

It’s what’s under the hood that makes this awesome…check…it…out

Notice the complete lack of tables…we’re just talking Divs, ULs, and Spans here people :)  This is a huge step forward when you compare it to the RadWindow which (while nice to use), is saddled with legacy bloaty tables (bleh).  How many times have you shown a RadWindow only to have the thing appear and the sides and top “POP” in when the images download…almost everytime is the answer, it even happens on the demos page.

Furthermore, unlike it’s more bloated brother, this little guy uses pure CSS for it’s dropshadows and rounded corners (IE be damned).

So does this mean that telerik has finally come to their senses and have stopped supporting older IE browsers?  Doubtful at the moment, but perhaps future controls will be more forward thinking, and maybe sometime in the future the entire suite will get a re-work to be more like KendoUI or the MVC controls (jQuery, cleaner rendering)

So what would I change?

1. Trim the fat: Look at the image above…it has the ability to show a RadMenu context menu, and that gets rendered all the time initially by default.  So the scripts and styles of that RadMenu get downloaded by the user even if you never use it.  So, I would not render it by default…display:none doesn’t cut it…

   Now it can be removed thusly…but you’ll have to remember to do this every time.

<telerik:RadNotification runat="server"  SkinId="MySkin" >  
  <NotificationMenu Visible="false"/>  
  </telerik:RadNotification>

2. Positioning: Allow the control to render inside another container on the page, not just free-floating.  So like you could turn OFF the titlebar and set the DIV in which it would appear…so the result would be an icon and text notification message with built-in hide\show animations.  You can kind-of achieve this with the RadXmlHttpPanel, but it requires you to do a bunch of javascript event handling where it’s baked into the RadNotification.
     I posted this as a request on the forums, but they said it would take a major re-write of the control.  Now while I have not opened the source to validate that, to ME it seems pretty trivial, just a bit of a pain now that it’s done.
     Wherever positioning is set telling it to render Top, Bottom, etc, just also check for inline positioning…and then move the controls markup into there.  I guess that though would limit you to specific animations, maybe that’s the tricky bit…like Fly-In would be retarded :)