DHTML in ASP.Net

Dynamic HTML paved the way for developing interactive web applications by manipulating web content on a page dynamically. When we say “dynamic,” we are referring to the manipulation of content and style of HTML elements in a web page, which can occur after or during the page rendering on the client browser. Therefore, this dynamic processing is done on the client side without any page refreshes.

Dynamic HTML basically constitutes the technologies Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and JavaScript. It is these three technologies working in tandem that help the web content to be changeable dynamically.

All the page elements in HTML are recognized by a construct called the Document Object Model (DOM). This model describes the structure of a web page by emphasizing each page element and its behavior with a set of properties and methods defined. JavaScript interacts with DOM properties and methods of this model to manipulate the page elements. We’ll discuss the structure of DOM later in this hour. Dynamic HTML was initially introduced by Microsoft in its Internet Explorer 4.0 version. Netscape has also come up with its DHTML support in Navigator 4.0. In this version, Netscape introduced the concept of layers, which was also known as Cascading Style Sheet Positioning. Unfortunately, Microsoft and Netscape do not share a common DOM. There were implementation differences of DOM between these two vendors. The good news is that efforts to standardize DOM are in place and under constant improvement. The latest specification of DOM can be found at www.w3c.org/DOM.