Jump Starting Your Site with Dynamic HTML
Active Content without Page Updates
By Rick Dobson
There's a growing level of interest in Dynamic HTML, because it allows you to introduce dynamic effects on the client side with fewer burdens on the Web server. Dynamic HTML (DHTML) lets you modify styles, reposition and change content, display multimedia effects, and manipulate data on your Web pages. In this article, I'll present the basics of DHTML so you can get up and running quickly, and discuss three key features: dynamic styles, dynamic positioning, and dynamic content. I'll assume you know basic HTML. You'll be even better prepared if you have some knowledge of Cascading Style Sheets, on which DHTML is based; JavaScript or VBScript, which let you exploit DHTML's ability to make Web pages highly interactive; and object-oriented and event-driven programming.
It's important to be aware that the Netscape and Microsoft implementations of DHTML are not completely compatible. While both Internet Explorer 4.0 and Communicator support Cascading Style Sheets and JavaScript, their object models differ significantly. Fortunately, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recently issued a preliminary Document Object Model for DHTML, and Netscape and Microsoft have pledged to support this open standard. In this article, I'll focus on the core features of the Microsoft implementation.
Creating Styles
There are four ways to reference styles in a page: inline STYLE attributes; <STYLE> tags; <LINK> elements; and the @import function; see
