Web Design in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

Out of the Dark Ages

October 1998 saw the release of DOM Level 1 by the web standards body, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). A collective effort on the part of Microsoft, Netscape, and many other W3C members, the standardized DOM finally enabled DHTML to deliver on its promise of bringing interactivity to the web page through JavaScript. Moreover, it provided a means to manipulate any structured document using any programming language (as discussed above). The W3C defines the DOM as a “platform- and language-neutral interface that will allow programs and scripts to dynamically access and update the content, structure, and style of documents.”

Thanks in a large part to the lobbying efforts of the Web Standards Project (WaSP), the newly standardized DOM found a home in Internet Explorer 5 and Netscape 6, making life easier for web developers everywhere. Unfortunately, this change went largely unnoticed in the web community, and many developers continued to ignore DHTML because of the stigma it gained early on.

With the arrival of 2003 came a resurgence of interest in the DOM and a shift in language away from the term DHTML to the new term: DOM Scripting. The shift in nomenclature is a conscious attempt to distance standards-based DOM manipulation from its checkered past. DOM Scripting encourages feature sniffing, browser independence, and graceful degradation. Sounds like a tall order, but in reality, more than 95% of the browsers on the market support at least DOM Level 1, with ...