Skip to Main Content
HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide, 6th Edition
book

HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide, 6th Edition

by Chuck Musciano, Bill Kennedy
October 2006
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
680 pages
21h 44m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide, 6th Edition

Chapter 13. Dynamic Documents

The standard HTML/XHTML document model is static. Once displayed on the browser, a document does not change until the user initiates some activity, such as selecting a hyperlink. The Netscape developers found that limitation unacceptable and built some special features into their browser that let you change HTML document content dynamically. In fact, they provide two different mechanisms for dynamic documents, which we describe in detail in this chapter. Internet Explorer supports some of these mechanisms, which we'll discuss as well.

We should mention that many of the features of dynamic documents have been displaced by plug-in browser accessories and, in particular, applets, as well as the new Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax) technologies. Nonetheless, Netscape and Internet Explorer continue to support dynamic documents, and we believe the technology has virtues you should be aware of, if not take advantage of, in your HTML documents. [Applets and Objects, 12.1]

An Overview of Dynamic Documents

Recall from our discussion in Chapter 1 that the client browser initiates data flow on the Web by contacting a server with a document request. The server honors the request by sending the document to the client. The client subsequently displays the document's contents to the user. For normal web documents, a single transaction initiated from the client side is all that is needed to collect and display the document. Once displayed, however, it does not change. ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Start your free trial

You might also like

CSS Master, 3rd Edition

CSS Master, 3rd Edition

Tiffany B Brown

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596527322Errata Page