What is Dynamic HTML ?

There is no such a thing as Dynamic HTML as a programming or scripting language. DHTML is a marketing term coined by Microsoft and Netscape describing a series of technologies intoduced in the 4.0 versions of both of their browsers. Dynamic capabilities were added to the 4.0 browsers.

What makes a web page dynamic ?

• Dynamic documents allow the author to control how HTML displays a web page's content
• Dynamic documents change as a result of actions of a user
• Dynamic documents can position any element within a browser window and change that position after a document has been loaded
• Dynamic documents can hide and show content as required

HTML Flavors

There are three flavors of HTML.

• Netscape DHTML
• Microsoft (Internet Explorer) DHTML
• Cross-Browser DHTML.

These web pages will concentrate on Cross-Browser DHTML. Cross-Browser DHTML works in both Netscape and the Internet Explorer.

Netscape-Specific DHTML

• JavaScript Style Sheets - JSS is like CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) but uses a JavaScript and not an HTML syntax
• Layers - allows the control of the positions of elements and their visibility (like CSS-P)

Microsoft (Internet Explorer) - Specific DHTML

• Visual Filters - allows changing of visual effects on graphics and text in documents
• Dynamic CSS - allows changing of visual appearance of document elements