Re: The *New* HTML!

[Barry Campbell <barry -at- WEBVERANDA -dot- COM>]

At 10:40 PM 6/19/98 -0700, George Mena wrote:

>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.

<snip>

"DHTML", as previously noted, is really a combination of features:
stylesheets, scripting, and "layering" (which each browser
implements in its own eccentric and unique fashion.)

Thus, DHTML comes in two flavors: Netscape-compatible and
Microsoft-compatible.  There is some overlap between the two but
also many differences.  If you are developing for an intranet,
and your organization has standardized on one brand of browser,
DHTML actually offers some quite intriguing possibilities.

If, on the other hand, you are developing for an Internet
web site where you have no control over the browsers chosen
by your user community, you have three choices when it comes
to "DHTML" content:

(1) Use only features that are common to both major browsers.
    This pretty much knocks stylesheets out of the running,
    and the layering implementations, but you're okay with
    simple JavaScript.  Budget a lot of time for debugging
    if you go this route. :-)

(2) Create elegant, feature-rich DHTML content, but do
    browser-specific versions of each page on your site,
    using a script to sniff the client's browser type and
    direct him or her to the proper page.

(3) Ignore this nonsense entirely until some standards
    emerge from this morass of marketing-driven "innovation"
    and it becomes possibly to design a single site
    for all/most browsers using "DHTML" technologies.

Many professional web developers have chosen options 1
or 3--I admit to being in that camp, even though our
office intranet has standardized on the Netscape browser
and we could easily use Netscape-specific features.

I insist on using standard HTML for our documents because
I want our documents to be as portable and maintainable as
possible.  Using browser-specific features now is a
near-guarantee of headaches later.  Why hurt yourself?

If you're working on a site where DHTML functionality
is important, and you've got the budget and want to
make a big impression, however, option 2 is definitely
the way to go.  There are some new tools out for creating
multiple browser-specific pages from a single page
template; the best of these is probably Macromedia's
Dreamweaver.

As for coding by hand, I was a devout fan of NotePad
until I discovered Allaire's HomeSite.  It's a *great*
text-based HTML editor that doesn't mess with your
markup but offers many useful features.  I've also
been experimenting with UserLand's "Frontier"
database and scripting environment as a web site
rendering tool, and am cautiously ecstatic :-)
about its possibilities.

http://www.allaire.com for info on HomeSite
http://www.scripting.com for info on Frontier

(if you're interested)

Best regards,

Barry Campbell
Web architect, technical writer, short-order cook