If you are interested in JavaScript and you have searched the Web for scripts, you surely have come upon the term DHTML. DHTML was one of the big buzz words of the IT and web development industry in the late 1990s and beginning of the millennium. You may have seen a lot of tutorials about achieving a certain visual effect on now outdated browsers rather than explaining why this effect makes sense and what the script does. And that is exactly what DHTML was about.

DHTML is JavaScript interacting with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and web documents (written in HTML) to create seemingly dynamic pages. Parts of the page had to fly around and zoom out and in, every element on the page needed to react when the visitor passed over it with the mouse cursor, and we invented a new way of web navigation every week.

While all this was great fun and a technological challenge, it did not help visitors much. The “wow” effect lost its impact rather quickly, especially when their browsers were unable to support it and they ended up on a page that was a dead end for them.

As DHTML sounded like a great term, it did bring out a kind of elitism: JavaScript developers who were “in the know” did not bother much with keeping the code maintainable, as anybody who didn’t understand the art of making things move was not worth changing their code for in any case. For freelance developers, it also meant a steady income, as every change had to be done by them.

When the big money stopped coming in, a lot of this code got thrown out on the Web for other developers to use, either as large JavaScript DHTML libraries or as small scripts on script collection sites. Nobody bothered to update the code, which means that it is unlikely that these resources are a viable option to use in a modern professional environment.