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In the end of 1990s everyone talked about how cool it is "to program DHTML". In fact, it was an umbrella term for HTML+CSS+JavaScript, there was no specific version of HTML, nor a public standard of what it means.

Now it's 2011 and everyone talks of HTML5, which is also a combination of HTML, CSS, JavaScript and some more additions like WebSockets, Localstorage etc.

So the question is, would it be correct to call DHTML a predecessor of HTML5, just the latter being a public standard? Or am I missing some point?

naivists
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    Note: Everyone talks about HTML5, except the group developing it, who want to just call it HTML... :) – Guffa Sep 23 '11 at 13:10

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I personally still say "DHTML" when I mean "manipulating the DOM with Javascript", mostly to differentiate it from "Ajax" which for me involves making XHR to the server. And "HTML5" for me means making use of the new capabilities in HTML, such as canvas or local storage. If you are building a web app these days, you would most likely be using all of these techniques at the same time.

A lot of people, especially in marketing, use these terms as synonyms, though, and prefer the buzzword of the day, which was DHTML, then Ajax, now HTML5. They just don't want to sound like a person from 1998 by saying "DHTML".

Thilo
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  • regarding "DHTML" to mean "manipulating the DOM with Javascript" - I still use it that way, too. The distinctions you describe between AJAX, DHTML, and HTML5 are important and worth maintaining. They are related technically but not the same, and it's important to understand the distinction. – Cheeso Sep 25 '11 at 13:59
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No, it's just that the term HTML more or less has grown to include DHTML.

It's like the term "mobile phone" which is no longer separate from the term "phone", because there is nothing special about a phone being mobile any more. Instead you use "land line" if you need to specify a non-mobile phone.

In the same way, HTML and DHTML now means pretty much the same thing, and you have to specify "plain HTML" if you mean non-dynamic HTML.

Guffa
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Quoting Wikipedia: (Emphasis mine)

Following its immediate predecessors HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.1, HTML5 is a response to the observation that the HTML and XHTML in common use on the World Wide Web is a mixture of features introduced by various specifications, along with those introduced by software products such as web browsers, those established by common practice, and the many syntax errors in existing web documents. It is also an attempt to define a single markup language that can be written in either HTML or XHTML syntax. It includes detailed processing models to encourage more interoperable implementations; it extends, improves and rationalises the markup available for documents, and introduces markup and application programming interfaces (API)s for complex web applications.2

The D in DHTML stands for "Dynamic" which means javascript, HTML5 is simply predecessor of HTML as described by above wiki article. This means DHTML isn't predecessor of HTML5.

Compare the definitions of the two:

DHTML:

Dynamic HTML, or DHTML, is an umbrella term for a collection of technologies used together to create interactive and animated web sites1 by using a combination of a static markup language (such as HTML), a client-side scripting language (such as JavaScript), a presentation definition language (such as CSS), and the Document Object Model.2

HTML5:

HTML5 is a language for structuring and presenting content for the World Wide Web, a core technology of the Internet. It is the fifth revision of the HTML standard (created in 1990 and standardized as HTML4 as of 19971) and as of September 2011 is still under development. Its core aims have been to improve the language with support for the latest multimedia while keeping it easily readable by humans and consistently understood by computers and devices (web browsers, parsers, etc.). HTML5 is intended to subsume not only HTML4, but XHTML1 and DOM2HTML (particularly JavaScript) as well.1

Sarfraz
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  • OK, I get that part of being predecessor to HTML 4.01, since W3C treats HTML5 as next version of HTML markup language. What WHATWG states here: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/introduction.html#is-this-html5? ,is "The term "HTML5" is widely used as a buzzword to refer to modern Web technologies, many of which (though by no means all) are developed at the WHATWG, in some cases in conjunction with the W3C and IETF." – naivists Sep 23 '11 at 07:55