Dynamic HTML: The Definitive Reference

Preface

I am going to admit a selfish motive for writing this book: I needed the finished product for my own consulting and development work. After struggling with tangled online references and monstrous printed versions of Netscape, Microsoft, and World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) documentation for Dynamic HTML (DHTML) features, I had had enough. My human brain could no longer store the parallels and discrepancies of the hundreds of terms for HTML attributes, style sheets, and scriptable object models. And no browser maker was about to tell me how compatible a particular feature might be in another browser. It was clearly time to roll my own reference.

At first, I thought the project would be a relatively straightforward blending of content from available sources, with a pinch of my development experience thrown in for flavoring. But the more I examined the existing documents, the worse the situation became. Developer documentation from the browser makers, and even the W3C, contained inconsistencies and incomplete (if at times erroneous) information. From the very beginning, it was clear that I could not trust anything I read, but instead had to try as much as I could on as many browsers and browser versions as I could. Multiply all that code testing by the hundreds of HTML attributes, CSS attributes, object properties, object methods, and event handlers...before I knew it, many extra months of day-and-night coding and writing were history.

The result of that effort is the DHTML reference ...