Comment by meindnoch
4 months ago
Most sites today are not using HTML in the way it was originally envisioned. They use something called "DHTML" instead. The D stands for DIV, because people seldom use any other tag. E.g. in normal HTML you would use the TABLE, TR and TD tags to build a table. In modern DHTML (aka DIV-HTML) people build the table from fixed size DIVs, and calculate the column sizes via JavaScript.
The D in DHTML is usually short for "Dynamic".
Around the time that abbreviation became fashionable using a lot of DIV elements also did, but that wasn't what the "D" stood for.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_HTML
I think that was known by meindnoch and was a joke.
I'd say DHTML was more of a thing in the early 2000s when we were still using tables for layout. The divs came later, when the abbreviation had fallen out of fashion because all HTML kinda was dynamic by default.
Not sure if a joke but this is factually inaccurate.
Accurate to some substantial usage, whatever definitional inaccuracy or backronym action is in play.
Descriptivism usually reflects some reality no matter the intended prescriptives.
No, sorry. It's factually inaccurate. DHTML stood for Dynamic HTML, it was an extension before Javascript and whatnot was added.
16 replies →
Man, I love it when I find a good <table>
https://matthodges.com/posts/2025-09-30-visidata/
What does SHTML stand for?
The classical answer is that the S stands for Server-Side-Incude (SSI). SSI source typically uses the extension .shtml. More info:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Side_Includes
SPAN-HTML, obviously.
This is a legacy of old apache configurations, the common mime type configuration files used .html to send the straight file, and .shtml to turn on the server side processing instructions. Server side includes could be static files or executable scripts that generated text on STDOUT. If you were using a lot of server side includes, it was cleaner just to turn on server side parsing for the whole site.
It's short for SHiTML.
Please delete this comment. If you're being sarcastic, this is not obvious at all to people who don't know.
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