Enigma n code overhaul

Here's a DHTML piece I did in 1998 that has had a code overhaul. it's called
Enigma n: http://vispo.com/animisms/enigman .

Marko Niemi recently translated it into Finnish, and his Finnish version
works on Mac and PC. It works on Safari, Firefox, and IE for the Mac, and IE
6, Netscape 7+, and Opera for the PC. I made a copy of his Finnish version
and did noitalsnart on it back into English, so the English version now
works as well as the Finnish version. I haven't done noitalsnart on the
Chinese version by Dr. Shuen-shing Lee yet.

It seems like DHTML has come a long way since 2000 when it was more or less
a nightmare to try to make cross-browser/platform DHTML. You'd have to
browser-sniff till you were blue in the face and branch away to different
versions of the file depending on how many browsers and platforms you wanted
to support, or keep the functionality to a boring minimum if you wanted any
sort of cross browser/platform range. I moved to doing Shockwave work in
2000 for these sorts of reasons, and also because I wanted to do interactive
audio, which wasn't well-supported by DHTML. However, it seems like most of
the browsers on Mac and PC have, by now, standardized on a pretty good DOM
(Document Object Model) that let's you do more than mouseovers in a cross
browser/platform way. Noitalsnart is a gentle way for me back into some more
DHTML work, maybe. Marko's code is a good way for me to learn and re-learn
cross-browser DHTML.

The advantages of DHTML over things like Shockwave and Flash are that no
plugin is required, people can view the source code easily, if you want them
to be able to, and DHTML is not proprietary, so whether it lives is not
dependent on whether company x lives or dies.

The disadvantage is that although it's a lot better than it was in 2000, it
doesn't have much of an API for things like interactive audio. And things
like opening up new windows are now more problematical because of pop-up
blockers etc.

Also, maybe tools like Dreamweaver are OK for creating DHTML stuff, but by
and large it's a programmerly enterprise, and the debugging tools and IDEs
are still a bit primitive. Not sure what the state of the available
libraries is.

Coming from a writing background, I like that the paradigm of DHTML is the
document, not the 'movie' as it is in Flash or Shockwave.

With cross browser/platform DHTML being doable now, I suspect we'll see more
work of this sort over the next few years.

ja
http://vispo.com