I’m working on a project and am looking for a front-end developer to help. I was told by someone who knows something about website design that I should find a developer who’s familiar with DHTML. Many of the responses I’ve received are from people with XHTML experience. Is it possible to perform the same tasks with XHTML as DHTML? In layman’s terms, what are the differences between the two? I’m sure each has its own benefits and to some extent which is appropriate for my needs will depend on the specific parameters of the website, but I just want an overall answer for now.
DHTML and XHTML are two entirely different, but related things.
XHTML is simply the newest standard for HTML. It’s called XHTML because it’s an XML application rather than the more cumbersome SGML which the older HTML standards were based on.
DHTML is not an actual “thing” it’s just a technique for manipulating HTML with client-side code, usually Javascript. (The “D” is for Dynamic). Anyone with some client-side web programming experience can do DHTML stuff.
Whoever told you you need to look for someone specifically with DHTML skills is living in the web design world of 10 years ago.
DHTML combined web page code, scripting and visual formatting in a dynamic fashion in the late 1990s. However, each browser had their own, often mutually-incompatible way of going about it. What worked in one browser very well would not work in another at all.
Now if you were hiring for this job five years ago, when the browser market was Internet Explorer plus a bunch of things no one had ever heard of or used, you could look for someone well-versed in Microsoft DHTML and been just fine. However, the inidcation now is that anywhere between 10% and 30% of web surfers are using Firefox, in which MS DHTML may not always show up right. Designing a page these days solely for Internet Explorer is increasingly becoming a liability.
DHTML has been surpassed by advances in Javascript and CSS, so you should look for someone who has those skills, and if you have access to the server of the page, Ajax experience couldn’t hurt either.
XHTML is the most recent version of HTML, and for awhile, it seemed like it was going to be important to know how to switch to it. However, market adoption was not as hoped, and now the W3C, the standards-setting organization for the Web, is backtracking and statiing they will switch to parallel development of HTML and XHTML. The person should know HTML 4.0.1 or XHTML 1.0, Strict or Transitional versions. XHTML 1.1 could be helpful depending on what you are trying to do, and the as yet non-standard but partially supported HTML 5 might be a bonus.
I agree with the previous posts, although XHTML can be more useful for sites that feed data off flat pages, as it is more structured than HTML.
Depending on what you are looking to do though, you may need different skills. Games are often done with Flash, but could be Javascript and CSS. Interactive sections of a website may need a different approach, and depending on yopur target audience, it may affect what Javascript and CSS you can use.
You can use AJAX purely client-side, but it can be awkward. All AJAX is, is a name for a method of rendering XML files by Javascript (or PHP serverside etc.) The same thing can be done by a whole set of other methods.
Could you give more detail of what you need?
I’ve decided the first four paragraphs of my previous answer aren’t particularly descriptive to a layman.
DHTML is for things that make your website flashy in 1999. Anyone with experience combining Javascript and CSS can do most of what a DHTML guy can do for you and more. Really flashy stuff is done today, not surpisingly, with Adobe Flash.
Your answers and everyone else’s have been very helpful. Basically, in summation, DHTML is an old standard, and someone with more up-to-date skills will know XHTML.
Also - XHTML is not an update of DHTML. XHTML is an update of HTML. (right?)
What the updated version of DHTML is is slightly harder to explain. Javascript/css is part of that at least.
No, that’s not quite it. friedo and some others got it right: The two are completely different concepts (except that they’re both related to web design). You cannot compare the two – it’d be like asking what the difference between movies and English is. One is a presentation technique; the other is a language. In layman’s terms:
DHTML simply means “a technique that lets webpages do fancy things without reloading”. It is a technique, not a standard, and it is NOT old… it has been improved since the 90s and AJAX is one of those improvements. AJAX is part of DHTML; the two are not separate techniques. If your webpage needs to handle user interaction and provide real-time updates, hiring a designer who knows DHTML, and specifically AJAX, would make sense. Somebody who knows AJAX necessarily knows DHTML, but it is possible to know DHTML without knowing AJAX.
XHTML is basically “HTML for grammar freaks”. HTML is the computer language that webpages are written in, but in the earlier days, this language was very messy and unstructured. XHTML is the attempt by web technology organizations to clean up that messiness and introduce more formality and rules into HTML. Both XHTML and HTML are invisible to the end-user, but it might make the web designer’s job easier since there are usually fewer browser compatibility problems when proper XHTML is used.
It sounds like you’re trying to find a web designer based solely on the buzzwords they know, but that isn’t going to do you any good because you don’t understand those buzzwords yourself. Can you describe, in more detail, what your project involves?
If you MUST perform some sort of comparison, you should be doing two separate comparisons:
DHTML (including AJAX) versus Java versus Flash (this will have a noticeable difference in the end-user experience, mostly in terms of how long they’ll need to wait for the page to load and whether they have to download additional plugins before your page will work.)
and
XHTML versus HTML 4.0 versus XML with XSLT (this comparison isn’t terribly important as long as your designer can make your webpage look the same on all major browsers. This choice would affect the designer (and possibly any future maintainers) much more than the end-user, who would likely never know which was used.