It should also be noted that, while DHTML may have been put on this Earth to let people make cheesy animations (they're all doing this with
Flash anyway), its real potential lies in the ability to create web pages that move beyond the one-step-at-a-time interaction model the Web was built on, and act more like real applications. Say what you want about the absurdity of building an application in a web browser when you could build it in
C++, but DHTML is offering ways to keep that Web page you
do have to use from wasting quite so much of your time. (And for those who don't think Web applications are absurd at all, there are projects like
DynAPI.)
It's also worth looking at DHTML from a peer to peer standpoint. This is not a gratuitous buzzword toss. Think about it: many people browse the web with machines that are absurdly overpowered for what they're doing. Overloaded web servers could be making use of those untapped CPU cycles by moving some of the work to the client side, in the form of more complex JavaScript interaction, client-side rendering of XML with style sheets, and what have you - thereby reducing database load and server lag.