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Comment by davidbarker | Hacker News Reader

That's the first time I've heard DHTML to mean "distributed HTML" — I always knew it to mean "dynamic HTML".

Yeah, it is dynamic. But the author also mentioned putting spacer gifs in semantically appropriate containers, so I think it may have been a joke?

Yes the whole thing is a joke, and is sarcastic. At least, that's the impression I got.

I worked at homeshark.com (later rebranded iown.com) in the 90's, and we absolutely did the spacer gif trick to size our tables.

Oh yeah, i think every one did - but they certainly werent used in "semantically correct containers".

Even HN, this very website, still uses spacer gifs. Sadly.

Spacer 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)

I don't understand why anyone would consider this sad.

Because 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.

I 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.

You could however nest horizontal and vertical marquee to make a diagonal marquee :)

My 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.)

I 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.

Am 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".

And HTML begat DHTML and DHTML begat XHTML and in woe and SOAP calls HTML5 was born

It's like "SpaceHTML". In space, they just call it "HTML".

But.....it’s dynamic.

DHTML means using Javascript to animate multiple LAYER tags inside of Netscape Communicator 4. The "D" stands for "Daft".

Good old document.layers vs document.all. And don’t nest your tables more than seven levels deep or Netscape will explode.

In 2021 it would be "decentralized HTML".

HTML NFT's

NFTML. Non Fungible Token Markup Language. Also has the advantage of sounding like AI/ML tech.

You're very rich now, somehow.

HTML 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/0xa0c38108bbb0f5f2fb46a2019d7314cc...

2021 will be remembered as the year when all the jokes died. When everything is reality, there can be no satire.

> When everything is reality, there can be no satire.

Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.

That 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”.

Which is the origin of hotmail.com, too. It was stylized as HoTMaiL.com when launched.

They have mistaken it with DCOM I believe.

I was thinking the same thing

Maybe they were confusing it with DCOM (distributed COM) which was often talked about around that time.

I came over to post this. I’ve never heard “distributed HTML”. And I’m not even sure what the distributed part would be.

Yeah, 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.

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