It wasn’t all that long ago that becoming a web page authoring wizard required little more than an understanding of a few dozen Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) tags, and perhaps modest experience with a scanner and a graphics program to generate a corporate logo image file. Armed with that knowledge, you could start an Internet design business or become the online content guru at a Fortune 500 company. Ah, those were the good old days...about two years ago.
The stakes are much higher now. The hobby phase is over. The Internet is big business. Competition for visitor “hits” is enormous, as it becomes more and more difficult to get your site noticed, much less bookmarked. Sensing that the authoring world wanted more out of HTML than a poor imitation of the printed page, the web browser makers and the Internet standards bodies have been expanding the capabilities of web pages at a feverish pace. These changes are allowing us to make our pages more dynamic—pages that can “think and do” on their own, without much help from the server once they have been loaded in the browser. But at the same time, what we authors have to do to make our new, fancy content play on all the browsers is constantly changing.
As a result, it is no longer possible to become a web content guru by studying the formal HTML recommendation published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Adding effective Dynamic HTML (DHTML) content to your pages requires an understanding of other technologies, specified by additional standards that exist outside the charter of the original HTML Working Group. In this chapter, we’ll discuss the variety of standardization efforts that are currently underway. You should begin to appreciate both how far the browser makers have come and how far they have to go in providing us with compatible DHTML capabilities at a suitably high level.
There is no such thing as a single Dynamic HTML standard. DHTML is an amalgam of specifications that stem from multiple standards efforts and proprietary technologies that are built into the two most popular DHTML-capable browsers, Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer, beginning with Version 4 of each browser.
Efforts by various standards bodies and working groups within those bodies are as fluid and fast moving as any Internet-related technology. As a savvy web content author these days, you must know the acronyms of all relevant standards (HTML, CSS, CSS-P, DOM, and ECMA for starters). You also have to keep track of the current release of each standard, in addition to the release that is incorporated into each version of each browser that you are developing for. Unfortunately for the authoring community, it is not practical for the various standards bodies and the browser makers to operate in complete synchronicity with each other. Market pressures force browser makers to release new versions independent of the schedules of the standards bodies.
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