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Taylor's Dynamic HTML Tutorial
Lesson 1

by Taylor

Page 1 — See Through the Hype

After months and months of press-release hype and stories about browser wars, source-code giveaways, and religious conversions (not to mention the fiercely heated, long, boring, tedious, stupid debates in certain newsgroups), what have you gotten out of Microsoft's and Netscape's 4.0 browser releases?

A 40-MB monster sitting on your hard drive? Or exciting, dynamic content that pushes the medium and does things that you've never seen before? Aside from some big sites that have the resources to produce 4.0-specific content (and a few other valiant efforts to explore this new space), dynamic HTML really hasn't taken off across the Net.

If you don't know what dynamic HTML means, check out Nadav's lovely intro article. You also should know that dHTML only works on the latest browsers - that is, Internet Explorer 4 and Netscape Navigator 4.

The lack of a single, consistent way to write a dHMTL page (Microsoft and Netscape support dHTML quite differently) has kept dHTML from really taking off. Once developers block access to users with earlier browsers, they don't want to go back and write a separate version of their page for each 4.0 browser. Instead, developers put their multimedia extravaganzas on hold or, worse yet, redesign their content for a plug-in. But believe it or not, even though the two 4.0 browsers are the most widely divergent browsers that have ever existed, it is possible to write pages that work on both.

We're going to learn how to build a series of pages that we'll lay out using cascading stylesheets and animate with JavaScript. Then, for those of you who think making images fly around is a silly endeavor, we'll indulge our practical, useful side and construct some user interfaces that were never possible before dHTML. After that, we'll combine both halves of our brains to create a dynamic, event-driven animation that responds to user input and has our own custom interface. And, if that's not enough, along the way we'll deal with structure, array looping, objects by reference, and more cascading stylesheets than you can shake a structured document at.

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