Development with the Force.com Platform: Building Business Applications in the Cloud, Third Edition

Primitive Components

Many standard components mirror standard HTML tags, summarized in Table 6.2. These primitive components might seem unnecessary because you can always write the equivalent HTML without using a Visualforce component. But one thing plain HTML cannot do is server-side conditional rendering.

Table 6.2 Primitive Components

With regular HTML, your markup always appears in the page, increasing its size and load time, and hiding it requires JavaScript or CSS. Visualforce provides the rendered attribute, allowing you to improve the performance of your pages by conditionally rendering markup based on the state of the controller.

There ...