Aleenanne : Reference : DHTML Basics

Taylor's Dynamic HTML Tutorial
Lesson 3
by Taylor

Page 2 — Syntax: Microsoft vs. Netscape

First, let's get the syntax down for creating dynamic HTML for each of the two browsers. I'm not going to list every single dHTML feature for each browser, only the ones that work the same in both.

Function	Navigator	Explorer
changing the contents of a region:	object.document.open(); object.document.writeln(); object.document.close();	object.innerHTML
identifying the region:	object.name	object.id or object.name
position from left of parent:	object.left	object.style.left
position from top of parent:	object.top	object.style.top
stack order:	object.zIndex	object.style.zIndex
visibility of object:	object.visibility	object.style.visibility
clipping region:	object.clip	object.style.clip
background image:	object.background	object.style.backgroundImage
background color:	object.bgColor	object.style.backgroundColor

As you can see, not one of them matches up. Well OK, object.name matches up, but since you need to use the ID attribute to use CSS on the object, you don't really use that outside of images, links, and forms. So, to do any scripting whatsoever, you have to do a lot of conditionalization through your script. That sounds painful, I know. But it's not always as bad as you'd think.

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