Inline code in head tag - ASP.NET

Question

Is it possible to do something like this in a head tag, of master page, which has runatserver:

 <link rel="Stylesheet" type="text/css" href='<%=Config.ResourcesDomain %>/images/style.css' /> 

This is not working, as it produces this kind of html:

<link rel="Stylesheet" type="text/css" href="&lt;%=Config.ResourcesDomain %>/images/style.css" /> 

Answer 1

The reason the output is being rendered like so:

href="<%=Config.ResourcesDomain %>/images/style.css" 

Is because ASP.NET is treating the link as an HtmlLink control, and rendering the contents of the href attribute as a literal.

This is a strange quirk of marking the head section as a server control, where certain elements are treated as server controls (even without being marked explicitly with the runat="server" attribute).

Removing the quotations around the href attribute resolves the issue:

href=<%= Config.ResourcesDomain %>/images/style.css 

Doing so stops the link element being treated as a server control, thus executing the code block and rendering the correct URL.

However, the above writes the href value out without quotes. Using the following, will add the quotes to the link tag:

href=<%= String.Format("'{0}'", Config.ResourcesDomain) %>/images/style.css 

Hope this helps.

Edit

Strangely, if you use double quotes for the href attribute, and include double quotes within the code block this also resolves the issue:

href="<%= "" + Config.ResourcesDomain %>/images/style.css" 

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However, none of the above are particularly elegant solutions, and setting the URL from the code behind is probably the way to go.