DHTML - A Bunk Term of the Past

Abbreviations and acronyms these days are multiplying by the pound. Everywhere you turn someone is making up some cute saying to shorten something. Mostly I’m all for it, if for no other reason than it just makes you sound cool when you can throw these terms around and know what you’re talking about. Actually, I can often tell if someone doesn’t know what he/she is talking about because of the way that they misuse certain terms or abbreviations. Or even if they spell or capitalize them incorrectly. A common example is the word Ajax. (Asynchronous Javascript and XML) Which is correctly spelled Ajax, not AJAX. A lot of people think it should be spelled all caps because of what it stands for, but the term is actually it’s own word, and no longer considered an acronym. This may be news to you, but any programmer that actually writes javascript will confirm this information. Another one that always makes me smirk is when people group Java and Javascript together. Like they have something in common. This is more well known among geek types, that they aren’t related, but I still come across it on occasion when hearing people trying to BS over their heads about stuff they don’t know.

There are a lot of terms that I like, and use frequently. Like ‘Social Media’ - it just feels good, it’s the embodiment of the postmodern web community. Or even ‘Web 2.0′, which originally I didn’t like.. But it grew on me as it began and continues to take on new meaning day by day. And now is commonly accessed in my library of language. And these terms are extremely helpful when explaining things to colleagues and well educated clients. For example, it’s much easier to explain Last.fm as a social media music site, than taking the time to explain all of the features of the site to a peer. You just slap the term social media on there, and your intended audience can automatically assume a number of things about the site, how it works, and how they can be a part of it. -Brilliant

But then, we have a few terms that don’t help anybody. They don’t make anything easier to understand, they often require more explanation than is necessary, and sometimes even confuse your audience more than before you opened your mouth. We call these terms bunk-terms. One such bunk-term is DHTML. Which is supposed to stand for Dynamic Html (Hyper-text Markup Language). But anyone that knows the first thing about html, knows that it is not dynamic. Hence the use of other languages as javascript, php, and databases. So the explanation then is that DHTML is the use of html in conjunction with these other languages. Well that doesn’t make any sense in a number of ways.

1. DHTML is not modified html. You use the same html or xhtml as you do on any webpage, the only difference is that you add other languages. But this does not make the html new! xhtml is a term that makes sense, because it denotes that you are using a refined and defined format of html. dhtml does not denote anything about the html!

2. Just because you use more than one language does not mean that you get to make up a new language and call it a combination of the others. I speak English and Spanish. That does not warrant me to make up a bunk-term and say that I speak Hyderish. Cause then I would get to have this conversation: “What’s Hyderish?” “Oh, it’s when you speak English AND Spanish” “THAT IS NOT A LANGUAGE YOU MORON!!!” And I would be a moron if I called it that.

3. Dynamic is not descriptive at all. It’s counter productive in the realm of explanatory acronyms. Any time I have someone use the term, they have to stop and explain what they mean by using this bunk-term. Its not like a normal acronym where you can just type out each individual term in parenthesis, such as SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). And move on, but you have to explain that this bunk-term actually isn’t intuitive at all.

So why do we continue to beat ourselves over the head with these terms that don’t help us? I would hazard a guess that anyone who is familiar with this term has been frustrated with it once or more times. Are we waiting for it to catch on? If that’s the case, who is it going to catch on to? Anyone that understands the term without a lengthy explanation, most likely is better communicated to by using more relevant terms. Let’s all do each other a favor and stop using such bunk-terms. -kenny