Have the problems associated with browser incompatibilities, technology advances, and .NET killed off DHTML and browsers for distributed application development? Let us know in the talk.editors.devx discussion group.
Cross-browser incompatibilities, insufficient power, and the march of technology have relegated DHTML to a small—and shrinking—niche.
by A. Russell Jones
December 19, 2001
few years ago, Microsoft released Internet Explorer 4, which changed the course of Web client-side development. Not only was it ubiquitous, delivered with every version of Windows, but it also introduced a technology called Dynamic HTML (DHTML), which combined Cascading Stylesheet (CSS) technology and scripting to let developers circumvent the rigid layout and limited interactivity supported by HTML. DHTML gives developers programmatic access to the Document Object Model (DOM) for HTML pages. By controlling the DOM with script, you can access any object in the page, modify its contents, its position, its CSS properties, and even add custom properties (expandos) of your own. DHTML opened up wide vistas for Web developers, and seemed poised to dominate interactive client-side development. But the furiously churning browser market of the late 1990's, users' resistance to upgrading, and the incompatible DOM and CSS implementations between browsers caused the wave to collapse.
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few years ago, Microsoft released Internet Explorer 4, which changed the course of Web client-side development. Not only was it ubiquitous, delivered with every version of Windows, but it also introduced a technology called Dynamic HTML (
