Windows DNA is short for Windows Distributed interNet Applications Architecture, a marketing name for a collection of Microsoft technologies that enable the Windows platform and the Internet to work together. Some of the principal technologies comprising DNA include ActiveX, Dynamic HTML (DHTML) and COM. Windows DNA has been largely superseded by the Microsoft .NET Framework, and Microsoft no longer uses the term. To support web based applications, Microsoft has tried to add internet features into the operating system using COM. However, developing a web based application using COM based Windows DNA is quite complex. The complexity is due to the simple fact that Windows DNA requires the use of numerous technologies and languages. These technologies are completely unrelated from a syntactic point of view.