Dynamic HTML - Uses

Uses

DHTML allows authors to add effects to their pages that are otherwise difficult to achieve. In short words: scripting language is changing the DOM and style. For example, DHTML allows the page author to:

• Animate text and images in their document, independently moving each element from any starting point to any ending point, following a predetermined path or one chosen by the user.
• Embed a ticker that automatically refreshes its content with the latest news, stock quotes, or other data.
• Use a form to capture user input, and then process and respond to that data without having to send data back to the server.
• Include rollover buttons or drop-down menus.

A less common use is to create browser-based action games. During the late 1990s and early 2000s, a number of games were created using DHTML, but differences between browsers made this difficult: many techniques had to be implemented in code to enable the games to work on multiple platforms. Recently browsers have been converging towards the web standards, which has made the design of DHTML games more viable. Those games can be played on all major browsers and they can also be ported to Widgets for Mac OS X and Gadgets for Windows Vista, which are based on DHTML code.

The term "DHTML" has fallen out of use in recent years as it was associated with practices and conventions that tended to not work well between various web browsers. DHTML may now be referred to as unobtrusive JavaScript coding (DOM Scripting), in an effort to place an emphasis on agreed-upon best practices while allowing similar effects in an accessible, standards-compliant way.

Basic DHTML support was introduced with Internet Explorer 4.0, although there was a basic dynamic system with Netscape Navigator 4.0. When it originally became widespread, varying degrees of support among web browsers for the technologies involved made DHTML-style techniques difficult to develop and debug. Development became easier when Internet Explorer 5.0+, Mozilla Firefox 2.0+, and Opera 7.0+ adopted a shared DOM.

More recently, JavaScript libraries such as jQuery have abstracted away much of the day-to-day difficulties in cross-browser DOM manipulation.