Mono is not an adaptive asp.net web rendering engine

Scott Mitchell writes in ASP.NET.4GuysFromRolla.com: A Look at ASP.NET's Adaptive Rendering: IIS ASP.NET renders web controls by first detect the user-agnet type, for this reason, ASP.NET Web controls are called adaptive. By default it renders HTML 3.2-compliant markup using tagwriter=System.Web.UI.Html32TextWriter. For
HTML 4.0-compliant agents (Mozilla/4.0 and above, e.g. MSIE6) it uses tagwriter=System.Web.UI.HtmlTextWriter. IIS does so by having a regex check for browser User-Agent. However, the default implementation doesn't address FireFox 0.8 and above, which is Mozilla/5.0 and HTML 4.0-compliant.

Here we will check the adaptive rendering issue around Mono1.x ASPNET instead of IIS.

Default behaviour
1. Test rendering by Mono XSP web server.
On MSIE 6.0: tagwriter=System.Web.UI.HtmlTextWriter
evidence: System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebControl is rendered as <div>
On FireFox 1.5: tagwriter=System.Web.UI.HtmlTextWriter
evidence: System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebControl is rendered as <table >
Mono1.1 doesn't address adaptive Rendering - there is no <browserCaps> in its machine.config

2. Test rendering by IIS6
On MSIE 6.0: tagwriter=System.Web.UI.HtmlTextWriter
evidence: System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebControl is rendered as <div>
On FireFox 1.5: tagwriter=System.Web.UI.Html32TextWriter
evidence: System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebControl is rendered as <table ><tr><td>

It seemed that Mono team get around the problem luckily because it was born at a time HTML 4.0-compliant browsers prevails. (At least it was what they thought?). But maybe we can still add <browserCaps> for backward adaptive? At least it looks straightforward enough to add Add <browserCaps> to web.config to enable mono becomes aptive.
Not quite though.
Checking native .net1.x machine.config, in <configuration><configSections> there is:
<section name="browserCaps" type="System.Web.Configuration.HttpCapabilitiesSectionHandler, System.Web, Version=1.0.5000.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a"/>
HttpCapabilitiesSectionHandler handles <browserCaps>. However, mono1.x build System.Web does NOT contain type HttpCapabilitiesSectionHandler implementation.

Conclusion: Mono1.X is not an adaptive ASPNET rendering engine.

Ideally we could add this to Web.config (affect single web app) or machine.config (affect all web apps on the machine)

<configuration>
...
<configSections>
...
<sectionGroup name="system.web">
<section name="browserCaps" type="System.Web.Configuration.HttpCapabilitiesSectionHandler , System.Web, Version=1.0.5000.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a"/>
...
</sectionGroup>
</configSections>
<System.Web>
...
<browserCaps>
<!-- if (working on web.config) { copy all <browserCaps> section from machine.config} -->
<!-- copy Rob Eberhardt's <browserCaps> (http://slingfive.com/pages/code/browserCaps/browserCaps_spaces.txt ) -->
</browserCaps>
...
</System.Web>

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