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That's the first time I've heard DHTML to mean "distributed HTML" — I always knew it to mean "dynamic HTML".
by davidbarker 5y ago
That's the first time I've heard DHTML to mean "distributed HTML" — I always knew it to mean "dynamic HTML".
- zerr 5y agoThey have mistaken it with DCOM I believe.
- WrathOfJay 5y agoI was thinking the same thing
- supermatt 5y agoYeah, it is dynamic. But the author also mentioned putting spacer gifs in semantically appropriate containers, so I think it may have been a joke?
- thayne 5y agoYes the whole thing is a joke, and is sarcastic. At least, that's the impression I got.
- robbyking 5y agoI worked at homeshark.com (later rebranded iown.com) in the 90's, and we absolutely did the spacer gif trick to size our tables.
- supermatt 5y agoOh yeah, i think every one did - but they certainly werent used in "semantically correct containers".
- kuschku 5y agoEven HN, this very website, still uses spacer gifs. Sadly.
- stordoff 5y agoSpacer GIFs which are resized for narrow screens (300-750px) using CSS depending on the tag's width attribute. That's not a technique I've seen before: > img[src='s.gif'][width='40'] {width: 12px;} (from https://news.ycombinator.com/news.css https://news.ycombinator.com/news.css)
- mitchdoogle 5y agoI don't understand why anyone would consider this sad.
- kuschku 5y agoBecause it's not really reliable and breaks in many situations. reddits old nested divs work much better in contrast, and have a layout that matches the semantic situation better.
- Calavar 5y agoI think it is a joke. Also, as far as I can remember, you could never combine <marquee> and <blink> because only IE supported <marquee> and only the Netscape family of browsers supported <blink>. I think there is a lot of humor in this article that is maybe a little too subtle.
- theshadowknows 5y agoYou could however nest horizontal and vertical marquee to make a diagonal marquee :)
- Kadin 5y agoMy memory at this point is faded, but I thought that was the point? You used both of them to cover both the Netscape and IE cases. (Hence, the joke, that to combine the two made you a Great Web Developer, since you knew about such things. The bar was rather low in those days, to be honest.)
- Calavar 5y agoI don't think so. <marquee> and <blink> do different things. <marquee> makes its content scroll across the page. <blink> makes it's content turn invisible and then reappear about once per second.
- roosgit 5y agoIn 2021 it would be "decentralized HTML".
- benbristow 5y agoHTML NFT's
- Jensson 5y agoNFTML. Non Fungible Token Markup Language. Also has the advantage of sounding like AI/ML tech.
- jrumbut 5y agoYou're very rich now, somehow.
- chrisco255 5y agoHTML based NFTs are a thing. You can reference arbitrary HTML & JS from the 'animation_url' in the NFT's metadata and produce interactive NFTs. ArcadeNFT is an example of a project that utilizes this: https://opensea.io/assets/0xa0c38108bbb0f5f2fb46a2019d7314cce38f3f22/4836 https://opensea.io/assets/0xa0c38108bbb0f5f2fb46a2019d7314cc...
- leephillips 5y ago2021 will be remembered as the year when all the jokes died. When everything is reality, there can be no satire.
- Kadin 5y ago> When everything is reality, there can be no satire. Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.
- ravenstine 5y agoAm I the only one who found the term DHTML to be one of the most useless initialisms that came from web development? I remember seeing "DHTML" still being thrown around as late as 2005, but knowing that I could refer to the components of a webpage as "DHTML" never seemed to have any sort of utility. I never cared that I could refer to the markup as being dynamic. Big deal. What scripts and applets could I add to make things move? Of course now we're still stuck with this "HTML5" canard that won't die because nontechnical people seem to believe it's more advanced than "HTML".
- outsidetheparty 5y agoAnd HTML begat DHTML and DHTML begat XHTML and in woe and SOAP calls HTML5 was born
- DonHopkins 5y agoIt's like "SpaceHTML". In space, they just call it "HTML".
- leephillips 5y agoBut.....it’s dynamic.
- thought_alarm 5y agoDHTML means using Javascript to animate multiple LAYER tags inside of Netscape Communicator 4. The "D" stands for "Daft".
- tclancy 5y agoGood old document.layers vs document.all. And don’t nest your tables more than seven levels deep or Netscape will explode.
- sircastor 5y agoI came over to post this. I’ve never heard “distributed HTML”. And I’m not even sure what the distributed part would be.
- Kadin 5y agoYeah, I clicked over to see if this was a joke or a mistake. I'm still honestly not sure. It was definitely "Dynamic HTML". Just a few weeks ago, I threw out a bunch of old issues of MacWorld... one of them had a cover article on the then-new technology of DHTML.
- WrathOfJay 5y agoMaybe they were confusing it with DCOM (distributed COM) which was often talked about around that time.
- codazoda 5y agoThat reminds me of the time someone told me they were building web pages in HotMail. I was like, “WTF?” And then he spelled out HotMail for me, “HTML, HotMail”. I was like, “oh”.
- Jenk 5y agoWhich is the origin of hotmail.com, too. It was stylized as HoTMaiL.com when launched.