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Comment by atum47 | Hacker News Reader

I bought a book, when I was about 12-15 years old, called DHTML (Dynamic HTML). It blew my mind to see things moving across the screen with just code.

Keep in mind that I learned pure html when I was 10, my websites were all very static (apart from a animated GIF here and there). The only way you could do a cool menu, effect or animation, was with Java Applet (which I learned after purchasing a online Java course that was taught over ICQ - it doesn't get more 90's than that).

I have this love relationship with javascript ever since I wrote my first "alert('hello')" and I wish it a happy birthday with many more years to come.

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In the late 90s/early 2000s you'd search (probably with Altavista) for a DHTML script that did a given thing (and often it wouldn't even be that dynamic, and might be something as simple as form validation; "DHTML" was kind of a catch-all phrase)

Only in the same way that people still use terms incorrectly. DHTML was the progenitor for the editing of styles on DOM objects that we do today. It has a specific meaning. Depending on how you did the form validation (highlighting input fields, or revealing error messages, rather than using an alert box or performing the validation on the server and generating a new page), it absolutely could have been DHTML.

It still bothers me when people talk about dynamic HTML these days. Just two weeks ago some team lead said it and I thought 'dude, that is so 90s'.

It's also probably incorrect; DHTML didn't involve loading data via AJAX after the page loaded, but instead configuring the webpage on the client side after loading it.

That said, ask them if they'd prefer the backend in PHP or Coldfusion.

As someone who's been making websites since 1993, everything you said here has made me twitch in one way or another. I've been a ColdFusion team lead, a PHP developer and I used to write DHTML scripts.

Also RIP to separation of concerns on the frontend (document [html], style [css] and behavior [js]) since it's all buried in javascript nowadays.

Rip separation of technologies (not concerns) and welcome to composable and soon dynamically run federated UI modules.

Given that Wordpress can be targeted as an API for a SPA and Laravel is pretty hot, I'd say PHP isn't a bad choice.

ColdFusion of course is pretty out of vogue, but places like Invision like it still.

A better comparison would be with ASP 3 or Perl.

Sigh. Working in cybersecurity, it makes me sad to see how much ColdFusion is still in use, full of security holes that no one will fix because the original developers have long since moved on and current developers don't want to touch anything CF related with a ten foot pole.

1999 saw the release of XMLHttpRequest as an ActiveX control for IE 5. There certainly were IE-focused developers still referring to most of what they were doing as DHTML and yet doing the earliest AJAX stuff, back when the X still made sense that it stood for XML and XMLHttpRequest was the first and at the time only AJAX tool available in a web developer's toolbelt.

Also don't forget about long-polling (long running request), or an iframe that refresh itself.

Reminded me of the MS "DHTML Dude" blog. (no longer online, it appears.)

I remember this book! I think it was red with a yellow font maybe? Agree with you on the alert(‘hello’) :)

Turns out I still have my copy[1]. I remember this guy[2] blowing my mind. He would move his arms to a menu, where your mouse hover. This whole book was a thrill for me.

1 - https://imgur.com/a/qMsw11C

2 - https://imgur.com/a/kZKyhok

This is very similar to my exact experience, with ages probably shifted by a year or two, given my site from 1999 shows a javascript alert prompt lol.

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