The concept of DHTML, can be traced to its roots of Dynamic HTML. Basically what this means is to create a page based on static HTML coding that allows for dynamic creation of content. This is done through any number of possible technologies in use today. Of these, the most commonly used element is that of the cascading style sheet. In the older days of HTML, one would have to implement all of the styling of the webpage through the tag elements in HTML. With the introduction of DHTML and CSS, they were then able to move the stylings of the page to a separate file which has also allowed for more dynamic creation of the page’s content. The simplest concept of this is the change from originally having to use JavaScript for image rollovers, versus today being able to use the style sheets for mouse events.
This immediately became popular due to the fact that while JavaScript is a fairly easy language to learn, most of the technologies associated with DHTML like CSS are far easier to learn and manipulate. Furthermore, the use of JavaScript embedded into an HTML document also conforms to the concept of DHTML as the JavaScript alone allows for the generation of dynamic content on the webpage through instructing the client’s browser to access a particular file.
However it is important to point out that while this may get construed a bit, there is a very clear difference between that of a dynamic website and that of a website built upon DHTML. The clearest example is the use of a database for the development of the page. However it can also be noted that most dynamic webpage languages such as PHP and ASP, are never seen by the client’s browser whereas the DHTML page is.
Unfortunately when the DHTML standard was initially released, since it was not well accepted into many browsers, there were a number of cross compatibility issues. As a result of these issues, the use of DHTML had fallen out of favour of many web developers. While this is no longer an issue, the use of DHTML is more or less only done in conjunction with a dynamic development language. Popular content management systems such as Joomla, Drupal, DotNetNuke and much more, while the actual script is run on the server side and never seen by the browser, the result of the hard coded template within the structure of the code is and in most cases also results in a DHTML page upon loading of the complete page. All of these will call certain functions of DHTML such as JavaScript as well as CSS to make the page conform to the design that the webmaster wants the resulted dynamic content to appear in.
Original Authors: Nick
Edit Update Authors: M.A.Harris
Updated On: 30/01/2009
