World Wide Web Developing with Internet Explorer 5.0 Making HTML Dynamic Continued from Introduction Dynamic HTML lets you define a user interface in terms of HTML elements and lets users interact with that interface. Together, these components make it possible to write client applications that live inside the Web browser. When IE5 requests an HTML document from a Web server, it establishes an HTTP connection to that server and retrieves the document. The browser then parses the document and retrieves any related information referred to by the document, such as embedded GIF images. Each node of the tree represents an HTML element that behaves as an independent object.
Application code can manipulate both the individual objects and the overall structure of the tree.
Similarly, user interactions with individual objects, such as rolling the mouse over an object, will result in that object firing an event, which can be handled by application code. When application code manipulates the tree itself, perhaps by adding or replacing nodes, the browser ensures that the document is correctly rerendered to reflect those changes. User interfaces can be built on the fly simply by building strings that contain HTML element sequences and having the browser parse the strings to modify the HTML object tree. It does so by defining one or more interfaces to each object type. In no way, however, does the DOM attempt to stipulate how the objects are to be implemented.