<p>The CSS Friendly Control Adapters for ASP.NET are great for creating markup that is easy to style.  A big benefit of the GridView adapter is that it generates THEAD, TBODY, and TFOOT tags, which allow you to do some really great things with libraries like jQuery - for instance, <a href="http://tablesorter.com/docs/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Tablesorter</a> for client-side table sorting.</p>

<p>The problem is that it seems to be a global on/off for the adapters through the CSSFriendlyAdapters.browser file.  What do I do if I already have a slew of GridViews currently in production and only want to use the CSS Friendly Adapters for a new one?</p>

<p>So I would be interested in two types of solutions:</p>

<p>1) A way to extend or modify GridView (a new tag is acceptable) to output THEAD and TBODY tags.</p>

<p>2) A way to conditionally apply or disable CSS Friendly Control Adapters.</p>

CSS Friendly...
Disabling Adapters
If you explicitly add
  AdapterEnabled="false" to your
  server-side tag, these sample adapters
  will attempt to use the ASP.NET
  framework's native rendering for the
  control. Beware: this is not supported
  and often does not work well.
  Fundamentally, the framework does not
  support disabling adapters on a per
  control basis. The AdapterEnabled
  attribute is only intended to be used
  experimentally.
Source
Alternatively, you can create a class that derives from GridView and overrides the RenderChildren method.  It may take some experimentation to figure out how to make this work.  I haven't looked at how the controls are presented in the GridView to give you any ideas in this regard.  Presumably, you'll just need to figure out which rows are header/foot and render / around them and  around the others.