Developing with Web Standards

Chapter Five: The DOM

The web began as text. Style—at first via presentational HTML like the font element—followed, but with the exception of links and simple forms, there was little real interactivity in the browser, because there was no way of making content interactive on the client side. Any processing—form validation, for example—had to be done on the server, which meant that whole pages had to be refreshed if a single element such as a required form element wasn’t filled in.

In 1996, Netscape 2 debuted and brought with it a new programming language, JavaScript (which, despite its name, has little in common with Java). And JavaScript brought with it real interactivity in the browser.

DOM Level 0

Of course, JavaScript in a browser is useless ...