Presentations of information can respond dynamically to human
interaction. To work in these terms requires:
- visual design and programming
- conceptualization of the initial information, and how it will change.
- sense of what gesture will trigger dynamic change
- understanding of who the human is, and what s/he is doing
JavaScript
This apparently innocuous scripting language exists in industrial
strength implmentations. These days, compatability is suprisingly good
across platforms and browsers. (This is for JavaScript, not CSS!)
It is standardized as
ECMAScript, by the European Computer Manufacturers Association.
Document Object Model
Each HTML document is structured as a tree of elements. As such, it is
amenable to algorithms such as depth-first search. Each element
has attrbitutes. The structure of the tree, and the values of the
attributes can be manipulated dynamically, using JavaScript.
Event Handling
While basic JavaScript event handling is not part of any W3C standard,
it is a defacto standard that works across browsers. For more advanced
interaction, the CSS2 event handling standard is implemented in
Mozilla. IE 5 & 6 have their own incompatible event model. This
results in some platform specific complexities.
