Microsoft Office 2000/Visual Basic Programmer's Guide   

Working with DHTML and the DHTML Object Model

DHTML is based on the document object model developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and is designed to give developers a way to create dynamic Web pages. A dynamic Web page is one where the page's structure, style, or content can be changed after the page is loaded in the browser without having to request a new page from a Web server. By using DHTML, you can create a page that can interact with the user without using additional controls and without requiring multiple trips to a server to update the page.

DHTML uses standard HTML tags to render and manipulate content on a page. It also includes a comprehensive object model that exposes every element on a page as an object that can be manipulated by calling its methods or setting its properties. In other words, everything you see (and many things you can't see) when you look at a page in a browser is an object that can be manipulated by using script. To see the complete DHTML object model, see the Object Model Guide.

DHTML and Scripting Documentation

The material presented in this section is intended to give you an overview of DHTML and scripting from an Office developer's perspective. You can find complete documentation and lots of sample code for DHTML, the DHTML object model, VBScript, and JScript in the following subfolder on your machine after you install Microsoft Office 2000: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\Common\IDE\IDE98\MSE\1033

The DHTML and DHTML object model references are in the Htmlref.chm Help file, the complete VBScript reference is in the Vbscrip5.chm Help file, and the complete JScript reference is in the Jscript5.chm Help file. You can also find a wealth of information about using DHTML on the Microsoft Site Builder Workshop Web site at http://www.microsoft.com/workshop/author/default.asp.

Note   The path to the Htmlref.chm, Vbscrip5.chm, and Jscript5.chm Help files reflects the language ID folder (1033) for U.S. English language support in Office. The language ID folder below C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\Common\IDE\IDE98\MSE differs for each language.