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Is DHTML Dead?
September 1997 saw the release of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer™ 4, an event which not only changed the face of web development but officially marked the start of the infamous ‘Browser Wars’. Shipped with every version of Microsoft Windows™ (beginning with the final beta release of Windows 98), Internet Explorer soon became by far the most popular browser on the web.
Version 4 saw the introduction of Dynamic Hyper Text Markup Language (DHTML) support, combining aspects of scripting with Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) technology and thus allowing web developers like Virginia website design the option of bringing far greater interactivity to their previously static HTML documents.
The industry was ecstatic; DHTML provided an effective solution to a large number of problems and seemed ready to lead the way into a new era of client-side web development. Then came the browser wars of the late 1990s which saw intense conflict between Internet Explorer (compared by many to the Galactic Empire in Star Wars) and Netscape Navigator (The Rebel Alliance?) which caused DHTML’s quest for dominance to stall in the face of incompatible cross-browser DOM (Document Object Model) and CSS implementations. Further hampered by many users’ refusal to upgrade, DHTML became a cutting-edge technology used by only a few developers due to its limited potential audience.
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1 Reply
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[Nilson Merced] “Shipped with every version of Microsoft Windows™ (beginning with the final beta release of Windows 98), Internet Explorer soon became by far the most popular browser on the web.”
[Nilson Merced] “Then came the browser wars of the late 1990s which saw intense conflict between Internet Explorer (compared by many to the Galactic Empire in Star Wars) and Netscape Navigator (The Rebel Alliance?) which caused DHTML’s quest for dominance to stall in the face of incompatible cross-browser DOM (Document Object Model) and CSS implementations.”
Firefox has quietly crept up to become the most popular browser on the Net, displacing Internet Explorer’s dominance. Even Mac users are adding their numbers to the myriad of PC users and are using Firefox instead of Safari.
Of the 1,209,538 visits that have logged into CreativeCOW.net in the last 30 days, the various browsers are as follows…
BROWSER VISITS PERCENTAGE Firefox 510,995 42.25% Internet Explorer 413,961 34.22% Safari 243,646 20.14% Opera 33,354 2.76% Mozilla 3,545 0.29%
Best regards,
Ron Lindeboom
Remember: Burt Bacharach lied. What the world really needs now is an undo button.
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