Dynamic Hypertext Mark-up Language

Introduction

Contrary to what some web developers think, DHTML (dynamic hypertext mark-up language) is not a web standard. DHTML is a term used to describe the practice of combining four technologies into one project in order to create a dynamic web page.

DHTML pages use JavaScript, the DOM, and CSS to modify a HTML document at runtime (when it is already being displayed).

Advantage?

DHTML was developed to answer a rather simple question: How do we modify the content of a web page, without having to POST back to the server?

Ordinarily, once a web page has been sent to the user's computer and displayed in their web browser, you can't change the contents of that page until the user either causes a post-back (via a HTML form) or refreshes the page. As you might imagine, neither situation works for us very well, as this can cause a fair amount of traffic on our web server...

Fortunately, some forward-thinking people developed some protocols we can use to modify a page, without needing a post-back event. Using JavaScript, a client-side scripting language, and the DOM, or Document Object Model, we can enable all sorts of fun things for our users.

Disadvantage!

There is a glaring problem with relying on DHTML: it requires certain technologies to be installed and active on the user's machine. In this wonderful age of constant web-hijacking and flaw-exploiting, it is not uncommon for savvy users to have JavaScript disabled in their web browsers. Without a scripting language, DHTML fails epically...

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