11.1. History
The earliest web browsers simply displayed HTML. That is, there was nothing a programmer could do to change the way a document looked once it had been loaded into the browser. There was no programmatic access to the HTML document structure.
Later browsers provided access to the HTML structure. Most notably, the JavaScript scripting language and the Java programming language provided an API that a programmer could use to navigate an HTML document within the browser.
With the version 4 browsers, programmers could not only access but also modify the HTML displayed by the browser. Unfortunately, this powerful feature, known as dynamic HTML, was implemented with very different APIs in the Netscape and Microsoft browsers. This created ...
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