Re: HTML 4.0 & DHTML

On Thu, 17 Dec 1998, Daniel Bulleros wrote:

> Good day! I'm just wondering, why is there HTML 4.0 & why is there DHTML? Is
> one a subset of the other?

"DHTML" is an abbreviation for the buzzword "Dynamic HTML", which
is a vague, nowhere-defined word used by some people to make an
impression. Typically "Dynamic HTML" means (some version of) HTML
_and_ client-side scripting and/or stylesheets. Or, as
http://www.w3.org/DOM/ puts it,
  '"Dynamic HTML" is a term used by some vendors to describe the
  combination of HTML, style sheets and scripts that allows documents to
  be animated.'
(Of course it's not really a _term_, i.e. "a word or expression that has a
precise meaning in some uses", to cite WWWebster.)

> I conduct HTML 3.2 training. I have visited the W3C page and I learned that
> HTML 4.0 talks more about CSS.

Partly because there is now more to talk about in the CSS area.
The HTML 3.2 specification was finalized at almost the same time as
the CSS1 specification. We now have some actual support to CSS1
(although the support is still very buggy and incomplete) and we have
the extensive CSS2 specification. Another reason is that HTML 4.0
contains constructs specifically designed for an interface to style
sheets

> If I upgrade to HTML 4.0, is HTML 5.0 or
> higher just around the corner, waiting to be released?

Well, HTML 4.0 isn't supported by any browser yet, so one shouldn't
get too enthusiastic with it or newer versions. The next version
of HTML being planned seems to carry the code name "Voyager", see
http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-html-in-xml/
What it really means remains to be seen. Basically, the idea is
to define future versions of HTML in a modular way. So if I get the
idea right, in the future you wouldn't say "my document uses HTML 5.0"
or something like that but "my document uses HTML modules Base,
Transitional, Table, and Object", for example. In practice, people
might wish to use shorter expressions in many cases, perhaps even
using things like "HTML 5.0"

Yucca, http://www.hut.fi/u/jkorpela/ or http://yucca.hut.fi/yucca.html

Received on Thursday, 17 December 1998 03:54:22 UTC