The Literal control is similar to the Label control. You can use the Literal control to display text or HTML content in a browser. However, unlike the Label control, the Literal control does not render its content inside of a <span> tag.

<%@ Page Language=”C#” %>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN”
“http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd”>
<script runat=”server”>
void Page_Load()
{
ltlTitle.Text = DateTime.Now.ToString(“D”);
}
</script>
<html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml” >
<head>
<title><asp:Literal id=”ltlTitle” Runat=”Server” /></title>
</head>
<body>
<form id=”form1” runat=”server”>
<div>
<h1>Look in the title bar</h1>
</div>
</form>
</body>
</html>

Because the contents of a Literal control are not contained in a <span> tag, the Literal control does not support any of the formatting properties supported by the <span> tag.

For example, the Literal control does not support either the CssClass or BackColor properties.

The Literal control does support one property that is not supported by the Label control: the Mode property. The Mode property enables you to encode HTML content. The

Mode property accepts any of the following three values:

• PassThrough : Displays the contents of the control without encoding.
• Encode : Displays the contents of the control after HTML encoding the content.
• Transform : Displays the contents of the control after stripping markup that is not supported by the requesting device.