It's almost certainly a joke but not obvious exactly what the joke is. What it actually stood for (in case you don't know) is "Dynamic HTML." My guess is that he's drawing a parallel with "distributed" as a modern day buzzword that's used in so many ways it's almost meaningless, but attracts attention and money almost automatically (other modern-day buzzwords like this include "blockchain," although that's fading, and "AI").
Incidentally, nowadays we never refer to DHTML because probably over 99.9% of pages use at least some JavaScript and CSS, so it's redundant to even mention them; you just say "front-end development."
> It's almost certainly a joke but not obvious exactly what the joke is.
That's the conclusion I've come to from all the responses. (Thanks everyone.)
The reason I asked is because I remember web development in the 90's, and the article while irreverent in tone misses the mark for me.
I think it's aiming for "The Register" style irreverence but their style is to have a cynical mocking and sarcastic tone while still being factually accurate, while this article changes facts in a way that feels like a joke, but stops short of actually making the joke or point it wants to make.
It's as if "This joke is left as an Exercise to the reader". Given the range of different explanations of "the joke" that have followed, I've come to the conclusion that the author has nailed the tone of being funny while not actually being funny.
DHTML was long before XHR; the term was more or less already out of fashion by the time XHR came along.
DHTML was used for situations like when you had hierarchical selects where the contents of the second select depended upon what you picked for the first select. All the code and data was delivered up front with the page load; you didn’t go back to the server for it with XHR.
That's right, I think I let the concepts overlap in my head a bit. Back then I was mostly doing game dev for PCs and some backend work. I remember pre-web 2.0 (loading a whole new page just to see the next tile over on MapQuest or Yahoo!Maps was.. annoying) but my just-waking mind probably confused dynamic to also mean dynamically-loaded. I shouldn't jump on HN before getting out of bed. I would delete my GP comment if I could.
The ability to pull down new results and load them was largely enabled by DHTML, though, because you still need a way to update the page with the new data. But now that I'm more awake I agree DHTML and the unrelated web2.0 features are different things.
I remember it taking a few years between DHTML becoming a buzzword and XHR becoming popular. XHR was slept on for a while even though it was available in all major browsers by the early 2000's. Back when we were calling things "DHTML," updates originating from the server typically would happen by refreshing the whole page, or sometimes an IFRAME if you wanted to get fancy [1]. Once XHR finally started to get popular is when people started talking about "Web 2.0" in the mid 2000s.
I heard that someone did a talk on why it took so long for the Web 2.0 phenomenon to happen even though the technologies were available for several years before. Can't remember who.
A little known fact is that even streaming updates (e.g. for live chat) were actually not that hard to implement on the front end going back to the original days of XHR, via "long polling" (basically starting a new XHR request that you held open until the next piece of info comes in) though it took until well into the Web 2.0 era for that to be common. The problem was actually on the server side; to cope with long polling, the server would have to keep a long-running thread (and in the case of CGI, a whole process!) for each of those open requests and the servers would get overloaded. Nowadays of course servers have much better hardware, and we have technologies like nginx that can handle huge amounts of connections in one thread.
In principle you could build almost everything in the modern day front page of Facebook or Google results page with the tools we had in 2001, front-end wise, but the servers couldn't handle long polling for the streaming updated needed for things like the Facebook chat. Also the pages are so complex that it would be easy to get yourself tied in knots without modern conveniences like CSS frameworks (or even resets!)
The whole page is tongue-in-cheek. In the '90s, <blink> was only supported by Netscape while <marquee> was only supported by Internet Explorer, so combining the two didn't make a lot of sense. Mozilla only added <marquee> support in 2002: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=156979.
Yeah, I think there's some deliberate mistakes in there for understated comic effect - e.g. "To this day [1x1.gif] is the only way to vertically center elements."
The joke (at least the DHTML one) is probably that only people who were developers then will know that's wrong. (Or I suppose this could have been written by someone who wasn't around at that time and this is a bit of faux nostalgia!)
I think the joke about it being "the only way to vertically center elements" is just referring to the fact that it's still kind of hard to do vertical centering and there's still no definitive, easy solution after 27 years of CSS. (It's now doable with Flexbox or CSS Grid as well as more obscure hacks, but it's still more fiddly than it should be.) Could be wrong, though.
Edit: I think thejohnconway has the answer [1]: the post was written before the Flexbox stuff for vertical centering was widely supported.
There were still less nasty options than 1x1 GIFs available, like "display: table-cell", so it's still very likely a joke.
I guess the joke here is that you used to do really a lot of in-line JavaScript in HTML, there was even a time during high latency where it was better to use inline JavaScript than JavaScript imports (<script src>) for faster rendering times (you usually just had 2 concurrent connections with high latency and low bandwidth). So “distributing” your JavaScript in a single HTML all over the place was the way and fail to go :-)
> DHTML, which absolutely stands for “distributed HTML” because that’s the name and this isn’t obvious bait for the no fun crowd at Hacker News…
I’m confused by this discussion…was the above quoted bit added later or something? Because as it stands, it seems pretty clear that making this very discussion happen is the punchline.
Is this a joke I don't understand?