Comment by junon
Comment by junon 3 days ago
Not sure if a joke but this is factually inaccurate.
Comment by junon 3 days ago
Not sure if a joke but this is factually inaccurate.
No, sorry. It's factually inaccurate. DHTML stood for Dynamic HTML, it was an extension before Javascript and whatnot was added.
Be sure to correct all the people who are using the term “cool” for things other than relative temperature, as it was originally defined.
See also the dictionary fallacy, and again descriptivism vs prescriptivism.
Additionally, even leaving alone the div/dynamic language issue, there really isn’t a point in usage history where DHTML came without JS — believe me, I was doing it when the term first came into usage. JS was required for nearly all dynamic behavior.
> See also the dictionary fallacy, and again descriptivism vs prescriptivism
DHTML is an acronym that expands to: Dynamic HyperText Markup Language.
There is no dictionary fallacy or descriptivism vs prescriptivism or defined meaning. It was simply an industry standard way to shorten all those words.
Changing one of the letters to stand for something else reassigns the pointer to something else entirely, or is the making of a joke, which I think the above may have been.
Javascript 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.
Accurate to some substantial usage, whatever definitional inaccuracy or backronym action is in play.
Descriptivism usually reflects some reality no matter the intended prescriptives.