Introduction to DHTML

There’s a lot of questions about what exactly makes HTML become Dynamic. To answer some of your DHTML questions, read the following: “Dynamic HTML, or DHTML, is not something that can easily be pointed out, or separated from other technologies. It is a group of technologies, when brought together, enable a Web developer to bring a Web page to life.

The three main technologies that make up DHTML are HTML, JavaScript and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). HTML is used for the basic structure of the document, JavaScript to manipulate the Document Object Model (DOM), and CSS to define the presentation and style of the document.

Before version 4 browsers, it could be argued that we already had some form of DHTML with image swapping in NN3. MSIE3 supported the first version of JavaScript (i.e., JavaScript first appeared in NN2), so neither of these two browsers had support for the JavaScript Image object.

This isn’t to say that these two browsers couldn’t display images — they could, but those images couldn’t be manipulated. To enable images to be manipulated required two basic changes to the browsers — a change to the DOM to add an Image object to the document structure, and the inclusion of this object within the JavaScript language.

However, the last part is not entirely true. Once an object is available in the document or window, no extra JavaScript code is required to support it. As long as the object has its own methods and properties, it can be used, manipulated, and examined using the existing JavaScript functionality.”

Read the full article from Internet Related Technologies.