DHTML

The Past
The term Dynamic HTML has been bounced around, with different meanings, since the Web's inception. Originally, it was used to describe the customized pages generated by Server Side Includes.

This HTML-on-demand was built with information received about the user's browser and operating system or in response to a client request.Search results, form posting verification and displayed database records are all examples of what we once knew as Dynamic HTML. HTML, that is, produced in response to custom input but before downloading and display by the user's browser.

More recently, scripting languages, such as JavaScript and VBScript, allowed changes to be made to a document after it left the server, but before it was displayed by the browser.

The Present
Today Dynamic HTML refers to technologies that allow documents to be changed after their initial display, without server access, through user interaction and client-side scripting. Page elements can be displayed selectively, then modified, moved or replaced. This ability to move and replace objects allows for the animation of text and graphics. In turn, selective display and replacement can be used for database record retrieval. Personal home pages as well as complex business applications can make use of the technology. Pages look and feel like native operating system applications, and all without straining bandwidth and server links.

And now the bad news... Both Netscape and Microsoft have proposed their own version of Dynamic HTML. Even though we believe the two will converge soon, at present they are quite different.

Netscape has packaged the following under the term Dynamic HTML:
STYLE SHEETS:
using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and
JavaScript Accessible Style Sheets (JASS)

POSITIONING:
using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and the <LAYER> tag

DYNAMIC FONTS:
using Bistream's True Doc technology.

Microsoft's Dynamic HTML is more ambitious. It supports CSS Styles and Positioning but expands on HTML itself with a host of new tags. Combined with additions to the scripting languages, an author is promised complete access to all page elements. All attributes are exposed to client-side scripts.
 
The Future
Netscape has released a final product that supports their version of DHTML. Their CSS implementation, however, remains incomplete. The problem list in the Preview Releases has now become the "Known Issues" page for Communicator 4.01 (a.k.a. Preview Release 7). See Links.

Microsoft has delivered a second beta, much more stable and certainly ambitious. Like Netscape, the finalized features are the proprietary ones, while the standards (eg. CSS) are still incomplete.

Diraja.com will also provide DHML programming to meet your specific needs of your company. Please contact us for more detail. Everypage of our current web site is enriched because of the DHML programming.