Novemberborn: DHTML as a Straw-man

Mark Wubben points out one of the rough edges of the "DHTML bad, DOM Scripting good" direction of a lot of recent talk about popular best practices in JavaScript use.

In our zeal to point at how great DOM scripting and unobtrusive JavaScript are, it's worth remembering that one of the key differences between these practices and the DHTML of old is that (as a group) we're doing a better job of using good programming practices in our DOM scripting/unobtrusive world of today than we did when DHTML was the buzzword du jour.

Yes, there are new technologies involved (standard DOM across browsers, XHTTPRequest, sweet open source object libraries), and yes, recent trends in JavaScript programming are something worth getting excited about. But the greatness of the methods getting so much buzz right now is in the way more of us are using the kind of programming best practices we all should have been using for years now, and some people had been back in those "evil" DHTML days.