What Is DHTML?

When it comes to web design, dynamic web pages are the preference of many a website owner and certainly many a website visitor. Dynamic elements can be added to existing HTML pages, or new pages can be developed using any of a number of dynamic scripts or programming languages. Dynamic HTML, or DHTML, is basically a more advanced method of serving HTML pages to a user's browser and is not strictly speaking a new version of HTML.

HTML pages are said to be static because none of the elements of an HTML page can change until another request is sent to the web server by the user's browser. DHTML changes this and enables certain actions to demand changes without that request having to be sent. This can help in improving the user experience and offers more flexibility in both design and deployment.

HTML, or more accurately XHTML is still used to develop the web page itself. The most important consideration of XHTML is that it must be valid because other scripts and the DOM (Document Object Model) rely heavily on the XHTML code. Also similar to standard HTML pages, CSS (Cascdsing Style Sheets) are often used to control the look of a page and how the DHTML is handled.

The DOM is the section of a site that “communicates” with the DHTML and allows changes to be made on the page. More specifically, they offer a method of naming and specifying objects that can then be manipulated according to a script like Javascript or ActiveX. The overall result is a dynamic web page in place of a static one.