Dynamic HTML, Danny Goodman

Order (or just read more about) Dynamic Html

Until very recently, you couldn't incorporate any DHTML into any web pages that would be accessed by the masses, simply because too many old browsers didn't support any of the features at all.

To some extent, DHTML is still a problem, because Netscape and IE support different subsets and sometimes have subtle differences even for features they both support. That makes it difficult to take advantage of many of the more wonderful capabilities without nasty and complex pages that work around the bugs and differences.

If you want to learn how to produce such cross-platform wonders, this reference is indispensable. It isn't a tutorial, but it's packed with useful examples and advice.

Even if you don't want to go to the trouble of writing complex cross-platform pages, there is a very small amount of DHTML that is supported on both Netscape and IE, and that is relatively harmless on older browsers: CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). Style Sheets let you easily apply a consistent look to your pages by defining the attributes that ordinary HTML elements will have.

This page uses style sheets, for example. If you use your browser's "View Source" tool, you can see the styles.

A style sheet can specify that the <h2> tag will mean a specific size and font when encountered throughout a document, for example. There's much more to it, of course, but even simple things like that can radically improve the looks of a page. It's a fair amount of work to redo old pages to take advantage of Style Sheets, but the results could be very worthwhile for future maintenance, so even I am at least considering making the effort.

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