This book has been developed primarily to let you know about Scriptlets, the latest DHTML innovation. Scriptlets are self-contained, reusable and distributable Web components made up of script code. They exploit many of the inner features of the JavaScript language but you can even write them with VBScript.
At the moment Scriptlets are only supported by the final released version of IE4 or higher and we don't know anything about the future of DHTML. At the moment, we can only try to guess the release date for Windows 98.
As you will certainly have noted, there too many "at the moment"s to be totally certain of anything… at the moment!
What does it all mean? It means that the Web computing model is changing and becoming more and more powerful and easy to use. It is gaining in flexibility, but also in robustness, quality and performance. This transformation will pass through DHTML. The next—mandatory—step is the introduction of some kind of reusability. Then a universal scripting language and finally a better integration with the most popular operating systems.
All these steps are outlined in the book, but we can't be sure today whether what we have discussed here will be the right way to go, even in the months to come.
The current DHTML object model and Scriptlets have still to gain a wide acceptance. By the end of 1998, we're expecting approval of the DHTML standard. This is the key event. Then, we certainly will have something like Scriptlets and something like Remote Scripting. Hopefully, we will have universal solutions not tied to any specific product or language. And then—maybe—we'll need to rewrite a book like this.