It seems that people still do not know what is DHTML, as I read text books that completely document this incorrectly. DHTML (Dynamic HTML) is not any technology, but rather a marketing term coined up during the era of browser wars between Netscape 4.x and Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.x. This is when they started expanding some JavaScript capabilities and dabbled with stylesheets. Each took a proprietary direction, until later when the organization W3C made standards. This time was also called Web 1.0.
Dynamic HTML consists of the following components:
- Markup Language (HTML or XHTML) that describes the structure of the document. In early days, it also described the formatting of the content as well, which made things complicated, because tags could both describe structure and formatting.
- Stylesheets (CSS) allows formatting of all tags in the document, and thus separates the content from the structure. This leaves the tags to represent only the structure, while the stylesheet formats or stylizes the tags.
- Scripting Language (JScript, VBScript, JavaScript, etc.) is a scripting language that can dynamically change attributes of tags and process forms. When combined with stylesheets, scripting can do exciting things like animations. Both Netscape and Microsoft in a rare moment cooperated to standardize the language through ECMA, and each new version of Microsoft JScript and Netscape (now Mozilla) JavaScript will conform to the ECMA standard.
- Document Object Model is a library that JavaScript can use to control a web page. Microsoft had their own proprietary standard, but is now following web standards called W3C DOM. Netscape had their own proprietary standard as well, but once they were reborn as Mozilla Foundation, they jettisoned it, and fully implemented W3C DOM in Mozilla browser and Firefox browser.
This concept provided an opportunity to have advanced client applications, but with Microsoft's slow adoption of web standards, and continuing browser incompatibilities, large swaths of designers and web client coders started to jump to an alternative solution using Flash platform, now under the auspices of Adobe.
