Web Design in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

A Sordid Past

During the Browser Wars of the late ’90s, the two major players in the web browser world, Netscape and Microsoft, enabled developers to manipulate a web page to create what marketing folks termed Dynamic HTML (DHTML). DHTML was essentially a combination of HTML for markup, CSS for style, and JavaScript for manipulating both of those (mostly in the forms of mouseovers and form validation).

DHTML was good in theory, but the two companies pushing the technology each developed distinct ways of coding the same behavior and accessing the same parts of a document. This led many developers down the dark path to “code forking” --that is, writing code to do the same thing in at least two different ways, in order to supply each browser with code only it understands through an intricate (and often fragile) system of browser-detection scripts.

For instance, Netscape enabled you to interact with its proprietary label elements when you gave them a unique ID:

document.layers['myLayer'];

Microsoft enabled similar access, but through a slightly different method:

document.all['myLayer'];

And the differences didn’t end there.

Programming in DHTML was time-consuming both in initial development as well as maintenance. Scripts, which should have been short and sweet, sprawled out over hundreds of lines of code. It was incredibly inefficient and frustrating for many. Eventually, DHTML became something of a black art, and the topic wasn’t often discussed in polite web design circles. You will sometimes ...