At year 2000 the main web browser was still Microsoft Internet Explorer.

And it had come out with version 5.5 on both Windows and Mac platform.

It featured colorization of the scroolbars and something new

called Dymanic HTML that Microsoft had invented for Internet Explorer.

It was a ActiveX module.

This was Microsofts own standard and no other web browsers supported DHTML,

not even Netscape Navigator that was the closet competitor against Internet Explorer.

 

Microsoft's DHTML Behavious was supported through:

- Internet Explorer 5.5 to 9.0 (Windows 98, ME, 2000 and XP)

 

DHTML Behavious was for multimedia and animation purposes.

Adobe GoLive had support for it like a timeline and layers like we know

from Adobe After Effects animation workflow.

 

 

I designed IMERCO Denmark's first and second web design in year 2000.
IMERCO is Denmarks biggest kitchen/living hardware store chain.
And the second version should feature an animated navigation menu
that was layered on top of the main navigation menu.

I had exported a lot of GIF's with MouseOver/MouseOut buttons
and I had made the graphics for the DHTML menu also in small GIF files.
I put it all together in Adobe GoLive including preload script of all the GIF graphics
so there was no lack in the GIF graphics when the mouse cursor was doing RollOver.
All the DHTML code was inside the main HTML file.

And the navigation and DHTML together made a 37 kilobyte HTML file. (HTML frameset).
At that time it was considered too heavy, because users was on 56K modem
connections and ISDN. So the DHTML option was dropped in favour of a
Shockwave Flash movie with the same graphics forcing users to have Shockwave Flash.
I remember my colleague Daniel Nicolaisen did the Flash movies for the navigation.

 

 

Here you can see a demonstration of the DHTML navigation menu system I designed and build in DHTML with Adobe GoLive. It is tested in a Windows XP Pro Service machine in Internet Explorer 6.0

There are no CSS, no Flash, no javascript, no jquery. Only HTML code and GIF files. 

 

In year 2000 when I did this DHTML concept build. It was to not force users to have Adobe Flash Player.

Today we have HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript with jQuery to make layering and animation with.

But at that time that was not possible. So DHTML was the first step for the multimedia features we have natively in our web browsers today.