The death of 'DHTML' ?
Saturday, April 15, 2006I read this article today with much interest, " From DHTML to DOM scripting" by Christian Heilmann. In it he bad mouths 'DHTML' in favour of 'DOM scripting', listing a whole bunch of "in DHTML you'd do this.. in DOM scripting you'd do this" style arguments to prove why the latter is the "new hottness" and DHTML the "old and busted".
Now I use the label DHTML quite a lot on this site and I suddenly had the thought: I might sound like an old dinosaur! From my point of view he's simply promoting better scripting techniques and I agree with everything he is saying. Basically, DOM manipulation is far better than treating the page HTML as a big string, start with a working HTML page then add scripted enhancements, use event listeners instead of javascript: links, degrade nicely, respect namespaces to avoid clashes... they are all the indicators of modern.. well... DHTML!
Yeah, I started with DHTML in the age of href="javascript:" and document.write() but I've never stopped learning and improving how it's done. The simple tab script I posted yesterday uses the exact same concepts he describes in his own tab example. But I still call them DHTML tabs. In fact I'd say I used DOM scripting to create DHTML tabs.
In the light of AJAX, has the label DHTML become old fashioned? Has DHTML come to represent the old way it was done? I hope not and I take some consolation from the fact that DOM scripting/Ajax heavy hitters like Alex Russell still use it :)
Updated: By the tone of some of the comments to his article I think others have had the same reaction as me. He seems to be making an interesting point in his defence that the label DHTML has been tarnished from so many years of abuse at the hands of crap code and that a change in name (to DOM scripting) is required to promote modern techniques. Hmmmmm.
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