Creating a full-featured extension for the ASP.NET MVC HtmlHelper class sounds like a lot of work. But, because of the way the Microsoft .NET Framework works, it's almost trivially easy. To show that, ...
When a request comes in to your ASP.NET site, it's routed through a series of message handlers (in ASP.NET Web API) or modules (in ASP.NET MVC), each of which performs some operation on the request.