Learning to program interactive pages is a cumulative process. This book begins by explaining basic concepts and then builds on these concepts to teach you how to access the different components of the browser and the document. The following sections provide an outline of the four parts of this book.
Chapters 1 through 5 introduce the relationship between scripting and the HTML document, describe the browser window, and show you how to use the Dynamic HTML event model. This book assumes a working knowledge of HTML and programming in either JavaScript or VBScript.
Part I introduces the object hierarchy, which exposes the four aspects of the document: structure, style, contents, and behavior. These aspects are discussed in detail in Parts II through IV, and since these areas are closely related, the explanations overlap somewhat.
In Dynamic HTML, all elements and their attributes are available programmatically. Part II shows you how to access and take advantage of the document element collections and how to manipulate the individual elements within the document. This part also demonstrates how to create rich, interactive forms that can process information on the client without requiring round-trips to the server.
Tightly coupled with individual elements is the concept of style, the topic of Part III. Using style sheets, the Web author can specify the document's appearance, spacing, colors, and so on.
Part III also shows you how to add basic animation to an HTML page. Dynamic HTML exposes a set of member functions that enable an HTML element to float and move over the HTML page, allowing the creation of simple presentation-like effects. In addition, Dynamic HTML includes a set of powerful extensions that let you add real multimedia animation and transition effects to your Web page. With these enhancements, the HTML contents can be animated using only a few lines of code.
Part IV demonstrates how Dynamic HTML allows pages to dynamically reshape themselves. The contents are exposed through properties on each element and through a text object model. With dynamic contents, HTML text and unformatted text can be easily accessed and changed.
Chapter 15, "Data Binding with HTML," shows you how to use Dynamic HTML to create client/server Web pages, including binding an HTML table to a set of data that can be locally manipulated. This feature allows you to create high-speed data-aware pages that can be sorted, filtered, and bulk- edited—all on the client.
The companion CD includes the sample code from the book, together with an indexing page that contains links to all the samples and can sort and filter the links to help you find particular programs quickly.
Also on the CD are copies of Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 and the Microsoft Internet Client Software Development Kit. The documentation in the SDK includes a complete reference to Dynamic HTML as well as other helpful information.
The author's personal Web site (www.insideDHTML.com) is a great source for additional information about Dynamic HTML. Microsoft maintains several Web sites related to Dynamic HTML, including the Site Builder (www.microsoft.com/sitebuilder) and JScript (www.microsoft.com/JScript) sites.