Are Microsoft DHTML and Netscape DHTML compatible?

Question

As above :)

Answer 1

Nothing microsoft is compatible with anything else on the web. their browsers always have independently chosen interpretations of the web standards. You need to ensure your code either works on all browsers, or is dynamic so that it can select different code for MS browsers.

Answer 2

They are similar, but not quite identical.

Worse, the various versions of IE are not consistent with each other.  

Fortunately, the situation has really improved in the latest browsers (any version of Firefox, Safari, or Opera, and IE 7)  The DOM has stabilized quite a bit.

Also, libraries like jQuery and prototype have emerged that simplify most of the tasks we used to do in DHTML, and abstract the browser compatibility issues. These libraries also allow AJAX, which adds some capabilities that old-school DHTML never had.

jQuery is a free Javascript library, available at

http://jquery.com/

You can see examples on the web site for one of my books:

http://www.aharrisbooks.net/xfd/book_7/

Good Luck to you!