Dynamic HTML Rides Again

Browser technologies originally developed by Microsoft have a new lease on life thanks in part to their adoption by Google. Known to Microsoft as Dynamic HTML, the so-called Ajax technologies can help developers build sophisticated Web user interfaces without relying on products such as Macromedia’s Flash. Ajax has emerged as a competitor to Microsoft’s preferred methods of client software development, but developers using Microsoft’s ASP.NET Web development platform could benefit from the technology.

Out of DHTML Comes Ajax

Ajax is shorthand for “Asynchronous JavaScript and XML.” Ajax applications are Web pages that incorporate JavaScript (or Microsoft’s JScript variant), display data to the user via HTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and retrieve data to display from a Web server in XML form. The key difference between an Ajax application and a typical Web page that uses JavaScript is that the Ajax application retrieves XML data asynchronously—that is, in the background, while the user is performing other tasks.