Comment by meindnoch

3 days 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.

29 comments

meindnoch

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asjo  3 days ago

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

  • throw-the-towel  3 days ago

    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.

junon  3 days ago

Not sure if a joke but this is factually inaccurate.

  • wwweston  3 days ago

    Accurate to some substantial usage, whatever definitional inaccuracy or backronym action is in play.

    Descriptivism usually reflects some reality no matter the intended prescriptives.

epcoa  3 days ago

What does SHTML stand for?

  • tingletech  2 days ago

    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.