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Subject:The *New* HTML! From:George Mena <George -dot- Mena -at- ESSTECH -dot- COM> Date:Fri, 19 Jun 1998 22:40:06 -0700
Since we've had more than a few posts on Front Page and hand-coding
HTML, I thought I'd post some excerpts from an article.
According to the March/April 1998 issue of the Microsoft Developer
Network News, a new form of HTML now exists. It's called Dynamic HTML
(DHTML) and programmers using the Microsoft Visual Basic development
system and Visual Basic for Applicatons are already using it.
David Stutz, author of the article, writes in part "Many programmers
using the Microsoft Visual Basic development system and Visual Basic for
Applications already use Web infrastructures such as HTML, MIME, and
HTTP to reduce the amount of code that they must write to solve common
programming problems.... With Dynamic HTML (DHTML), Microsoft has
pioneered a new and entirely different way to use HTML. No longer is it
limited to describing browser "content." Instead, DHTML now forms the
basis for a broad new programming model that can provide a rich,
interactive UI for any application for Microsoft Windows. DHTML can be
used to produce customized client/server front ends not only in
so-called "thin client" scenarios, but also in traditional EXE-based
clients....Programmers can declaratively describe the appearance of a
form, a help page, a control or other programmatic visual element using
DHTML's simple, text-based file format. Because this description is
declarative, many lines of code that might have existed to handle
resizing, positioning and layout can remain unwritten!"
Besides rich declarative formatting, DHTML also offers the following
features:
Dynamic layout and resizing behavior
Table-based layout
Scrolling and bottomless forms
Rich typographical support
More measurement units
Built-in graphics types
Style sheets
Multimedia effects
Object plumbing features such as:
* event bubbling, where events raised by visual DHTML elements are
propagated through the structural hierarchy of the document, which means
multiple objects can share an event handler and that multiple handlers
can be called for a single event.
* event canceling of DHTML events propagated along the page's tree
of tags by the event handlers being used.
* styles (the ability to apply a single style to multiple objects
dynamically and to apply multiple styles to a single object in
sequence).
* property inheritance, where multiple styles can be combined and
applied to a single object.
Accessing the Dynamic HTML Object Model is done from within Visual Basic
5.0, according to Stutz's sidebar article on page 4 of the MSDN News.
To understand the subtleties, Stutz also recommends consulting the
Microsoft Internet Software Development Kit in his original front-page
article.
To read the MSDN news articles on Dynamic HTML in their entirety, go to http://www.microsoft.com/msdn/news/devnews/ You'll probably have to
register with the Developer Web site as a developer, but that's not a
big deal to do.
The question I have for everyone is how Dynamic HTML is expected to
impact the TW community. There's been some discussion on hand-coding in
Notepad as a workaround for Front Page, but something tells me the rules
just changed.
Next.
George Mena
Technical Writing Consultant
George -dot- Mena -at- esstech -dot- com
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