Dynamic HTML: The Definitive Reference

Internet Explorer 4 DHTML

While Internet Explorer 3 (for Windows) did not even allow for swapping of images after a document loaded, IE 4 provides substantial facilities for dynamically modifying the content of a page after it has loaded. In addition, you can dynamically create content during loading with the help of VBScript or JScript, just as you could in IE 3. IE 4 exposes virtually every element defined by HTML in a document to the scripting language of your choice.

Cascading Style Sheets Level 1

Some CSS functionality was introduced in IE 3, but almost every aspect of the W3C recommendation for CSS1 is implemented in IE 4. Only a few CSS1 attributes, such as word-spacing and white-space, are missing from the IE 4 implementation.

CSS-Positioning

In addition to supporting the specifications of the working draft of CSS-Positioning that existed at the time of IE 4’s release in 1997, the browser also allows you to apply CSS-P attributes to individual HTML elements—including those that are not containers. Therefore, you can assign a specific position and visibility to, say, an image, even when it is not surrounded by a container tag such as <DIV> or <SPAN>:

<IMG SRC="myFace.jpg" HEIGHT=60 WIDTH=40 
STYLE="position:absolute; left:200; top:100">

Of course, you can also assign positioning attributes to containers, if you prefer.

Dynamic Content

IE 4’s rendering engine is designed in such a way that it can respond very quickly to changes in content. The browser’s document object ...