26 May 06

DHTML

You know it’s (another) bad sign when you start to dream about HTML and Javascript, but whilst stirring this morning, I was thinking “Ooh, why is it called DHTML? It doesn’t dynamically change the HTML at all! It’s a rubbish name!”

Thinking about it, maybe I’m right. DHTML doesn’t alter any of the structure of HTML at all, so it’s not dynamic HTML. A more appropiate example of what DHTML could be is AJAX. AJAX can alter parts of HTML dynamically. Making it DHTML. AJAX = DHTML. Which is a much better name for it – whoever thought of AJAX for the original name is bonkers.

What does that make old skool DHTML then? You know the type that was around in 1999, which made menus swoop across the page and were mildly impressive in IE (and broken in anything else). Surely we could call that Dynamic CSS, as the properties of the style are being alter – be it the position or the colo(u)r.

But what about DOM scripting – manipulation of the document object model, for those not in the know, or messing about the HTML structure in layman terms – where does this lie? This usually gets lumped in with AJAX by people not in the know (“Ooh, that’s a nice piece of AJAX!” “No, it’s not.”), but like it, it does alter the HTML, so we could say that DHTML = AJAX + DOM scripting and DCSS = making things already on the page change appearance.

But having DHTML and DCSS on my CV wouldn’t look too good, would it? People would think I was making these buzzwords up to make myself sound clever…

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