Comment by junon
3 days ago
Javascript was not ubiquitous when the term DHTML was last seriously used. And yes, CSS and javascript were extensions at the time, not very widely supported across all browsers.
We had table based layouts and then divs when CSS started to take off, mostly used by artists rather than companies at first.
Javascript had vanishingly limited uses at first, too. I don't remember exactly how long it took us to get XHR but before that we had "Comet frames", before iframe security was given much focus. Javascript couldn't do that for a while. It was also dodgy and considered bad practice for quite a while, too.
I don't remember when the term javascript was even really used in regular vernacular but DHTML was not so much referring to CSS as it was the myriad of weird mechanisms introduced to make pages dynamic. It was never "Div-based HTML" or whatever, the div craze came way later once CSS was Good Enough to eschew table layouts - after which, Dreamweaver died and photoshop's slice tool finally got removed, and we started inching toward where the web sits today.
I also do distinctly recall needing a doctype for DHTML for some browsers.
> Javascript was not ubiquitous when the term DHTML was last seriously used.
It wasn't as fast or as usable as it is today, but Javascript has been in every mainstream browser since before Microsoft started pushing "DHTML".
Interestingly, in my memory, it seemed like we had JS for a long time before DHTML, but it was only a couple years between Eich writing it and IE4, which was the start of the "DHTML" moniker. Looking back at the timeline, everything seems much more compressed than it felt at the time.
That could be. And yeah, DHTML came and went pretty quickly even by today's standards.
DHTML was just JavaScript that mutated the DOM. That’s literally all it ever was. There was also not a DHTML doctype. There was also not anything even called “an extension”. There were Java applets, ActiveX controls, and ActionScript -> JavaScript bridges, which the concept of DHTML (dynamic HTML) eventually fully replaced.
Divs weren’t a “craze”. They were popularized by the (brand new) XHTML spec, which did have its own doctype.
> I don't remember when the term javascript was even really used in regular vernacular
2004 or 2005. Gmail and Google Maps were a "holy crap this is actually possible?" for a lot of people, both technical and non, and was when javascript switched from mostly-ignored* to embraced.
*Just minor enhancements, outside of technical people mostly only known to MySpace users who wanted to add a little flair to their page. XmlHttpRequest was almost entirely unknown even in technical spaces until gmail showcased interaction without page refreshes.
Not sure why you're being downvoted, but actually yeah, this isn't far off from my recollection either.