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Most sites today are not using HTML in the way it was originally envisioned. They use something called "DHTML" instead. The D stands for DIV, because people sel
by meindnoch 1y ago
Most sites today are not using HTML in the way it was originally envisioned. They use something called "DHTML" instead. The D stands for DIV, because people seldom use any other tag. E.g. in normal HTML you would use the TABLE, TR and TD tags to build a table. In modern DHTML (aka DIV-HTML) people build the table from fixed size DIVs, and calculate the column sizes via JavaScript.
- asjo 1y agoThe D in DHTML is usually short for "Dynamic". Around the time that abbreviation became fashionable using a lot of DIV elements also did, but that wasn't what the "D" stood for. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_HTML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_HTML
- 1718627440 1y agoI think that was known by meindnoch and was a joke.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- throw-the-towel 1y agoI'd say DHTML was more of a thing in the early 2000s when we were still using tables for layout. The divs came later, when the abbreviation had fallen out of fashion because all HTML kinda was dynamic by default.
- bapak 1y agoPlease delete this comment. If you're being sarcastic, this is not obvious at all to people who don't know.
- decremental 1y ago[dead]
- junon 1y agoNot sure if a joke but this is factually inaccurate.
- wwweston 1y agoAccurate to some substantial usage, whatever definitional inaccuracy or backronym action is in play. Descriptivism usually reflects some reality no matter the intended prescriptives.
- junon 1y agoNo, sorry. It's factually inaccurate. DHTML stood for Dynamic HTML, it was an extension before Javascript and whatnot was added.
- k33n 1y agoDHTML is literally just HTML that is dynamically modified by JavaScript. DHTML became a term when JavaScript became ubiquitous. It was not an extension.
- junon 1y agoJavascript was not ubiquitous when the term DHTML was last seriously used. And yes, CSS and javascript were extensions at the time, not very widely supported across all browsers. We had table based layouts and then divs when CSS started to take off, mostly used by artists rather than companies at first. Javascript had vanishingly limited uses at first, too. I don't remember exactly how long it took us to get XHR but before that we had "Comet frames", before iframe security was given much focus. Javascript couldn't do that for a while. It was also dodgy and considered bad practice for quite a while, too. I don't remember when the term javascript was even really used in regular vernacular but DHTML was not so much referring to CSS as it was the myriad of weird mechanisms introduced to make pages dynamic. It was never "Div-based HTML" or whatever, the div craze came way later once CSS was Good Enough to eschew table layouts - after which, Dreamweaver died and photoshop's slice tool finally got removed, and we started inching toward where the web sits today. I also do distinctly recall needing a doctype for DHTML for some browsers.
- epcoa 1y agoWhat does SHTML stand for?
- chuckhoupt 1y agoThe classical answer is that the S stands for Server-Side-Incude (SSI). SSI source typically uses the extension .shtml. More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Side_Includes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Side_Includes
- andrewflnr 1y agoSPAN-HTML, obviously.
- DonHopkins 1y agoIt's short for SHiTML.
- tingletech 1y agoThis is a legacy of old apache configurations, the common mime type configuration files used .html to send the straight file, and .shtml to turn on the server side processing instructions. Server side includes could be static files or executable scripts that generated text on STDOUT. If you were using a lot of server side includes, it was cleaner just to turn on server side parsing for the whole site.
- m-hodges 1y agoMan, I love it when I find a good <table> https://matthodges.com/posts/2025-09-30-visidata/ https://matthodges.com/posts/2025-09-30-visidata/