But what do the big guns have to say? Netscape has their view of what makes HTML dynamic and Microsoft defines Dynamic HTML in yet another way. They cannot even agree on an acronym. The W3C doesn't even call it DHTML, but lumps most of the features into the proposed HTML 4 standard. By the time HTML 5 rolls around (not long in Web time), content will be dynamic, and plugins will be a thing of the past.
More of the standard sound and fury? Not this time. The losers of past and present have fizzled because the Web at large doesn't care about promises or good PR. In the case of DHTML, the reality was here before the hype even started. The 4.0 versions of the two big browsers deliver the goods, albeit in a somewhat buggy, incompatible, and incomplete form. Luckily, and unusually, forces are converging to make DHTML work better and work everywhere. This is not just another proprietary extension to HTML, slated for the same fate as Netscape's unlamented MULTICOL or Microsoft's MARQUEE.