From DHTML to DOM scripting By Chris Heilmann

From DHTML to DOM scripting

By Chris Heilmann

In this article we will try to help JavaScript beginners to spot old and outdated JavaScript techniques and explain what their issues are. We do this by looking at a web page that might have been developed around the millennium with development ideas that were good at the time (DHTML), but result in inaccessible or even broken pages in today's web environment.

If you want to take a look at the code examples offline, you can download the example site as a zip.

This article is aimed at developers who are new to JavaScript, or those who haven't touched it in a while and wonder why people tell them off for using techniques that were the bee's knees in 1999.

We will take a demonstration page that features three dynamic elements using JavaScript, take a look at how they were achieved, and give an example of a modern way of re-creating them more future-proof and less in the way of the visitor (DOM scripting). Let's start with a bit of background knowledge about what DHTML and the DOM are.

Read More/Download