Scriptlets are one of the latest innovations in IE 4. They are the missing link that further enriches the Dynamic HTML object model, and makes it interesting not only to Web developers, but also to VB and VC++ developers. The integration between IE4 and the upcoming Windows 98 shell pushes Dynamic HTML as a real development platform. However, any real-world application development platform must provide a way (and if possible an efficient and safe way) to reuse code. Scriptlets are just this: self-contained and programmable Dynamic HTML pages that can be hosted inside other HTML pages as components.
In this chapter, we'll introduce the concept of Scriptlets, and show you how to get started using them in your own pages. While the underlying technology that makes them work is quite complex, as a Web author we can ignore most of this complexity and let Internet Explorer handle it in the background for us automatically. As you'll see, Scriptlets offer an exciting mix of easy construction, with quite amazing abilities. In effect, they allow us to create our own ActiveX controls, without resorting to a 'real' programming language like Visual Basic, C++, Delphi, etc.
So, we'll be covering:
To start with, we'll take an overview of what Scriptlets are, and see a couple of simple examples.