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A Lighthouse guide to keeping your Web site off 1997's technological rocksWhen you look back on the World Wide Web of 1997, you can see it was summed up by a most unlikely source - IBM. Yes, fusty old IBM, the doddering geriatric of hip late-1990s technology, sent out its ad-people to make fun of geeks. They ran commercials where youngsters obsessed with neat-looking browser graphics and gee-whiz effects were challenged to explain just how their Web sites might be useful. There's something about the Web which has encouraged an endless stream of hype about the future. Now the hypesters are having their bluffs called. IBM captured the mood of 1997. Fascination with technology for technology's sake didn't cut it any more; calls to jump on the latest bandwagon suddenly got a sceptical hearing. The Web left adolescence and started to think about getting a job. "Usefulness" turned out to be the year's biggest trend. Businesses suddenly found a benefit in connecting their Web sites to dull old databases to serve up boring information like product specifications and tailored pricing. Products like Microsoft Active Server Pages and Allaire's Cold Fusion made their presence felt. Web Hype finally got its come-uppance. Those Were The Good Old DaysYou might not have guessed it back in January. The year opened with Web visionaries in full cry, hyping for all they were worth. In the offices of Wired magazine, the techno-libertarian headquarters of Hype, the editors were hatching a sweeping big-picture piece to appear in the March issue. Entitled "Kiss Your Browser Goodbye!", it confidently foretold "The radical future of media beyond the Web". Replacing the browser was a new medium "surging across the Web" - a medium called push technology, powered by technologies like Java and ActiveX. As it turned out, the browser survived 1997 pretty well. Wired's credibility got kissed goodbye instead. Wired's ex-hippie visionaries had already seen their radical dreams of a quarter-century earlier get mugged by reality. Now their new dreams turned to the same sort of mush, only at ten times the speed. Hype 1: PUSH!Push turned out to be just like e-mail, only more often and more annoying. Pointcast briefly visited thousands of computers, only to be uninstalled by users sick of a program which jumped up and down demanding attention to shallow news grabs, or by network supervisors worried about the server load created by a couple of thousand attempts a day to download the same information.
Hype 2: JAVA!Java didn't fare much better. In its January 1997 issue, Byte magazine asked "Can Java replace Windows?". Like almost everyone else, Byte was thrilled by the prospect of a language that would run on all computers. But as Java ran into its own compatibility problems, as the fancy new code turned up running slow-as-a-wombat on people's computers, and as Apple turned itself into a niche product with more dedication than anyone could have imagined, you began to suspect that the true common language of computing might be 32-bit Windows. Now Java's defenders have begun talking about it as a technology for running Web servers, not Web applications. Out on the general Internet, the question is suddenly whether Java can do much else at all, apart from keeping Sun Microsystems chief Scott McNealy on magazine covers. In October, Cnet ranked it number one on a list of "10 technologies that don't stand a chance".
Hype 3: ACTIVEX!Meanwhile, the Microsoft technology which was going to "Activate the Internet" seems to have been itself deactivated. ActiveX just never quite made it into mainstream Web use - held back, no doubt, by its inability to do anything at all for those many users of the Netscape browser family.
Hype 4: VIDEO!Moving pictures haven't made it onto the Web either. Forrester Research's John McCarthy nominated "screwing around with video" as the silliest thing on the Web right now. Screwing around with audio remained surprisingly unpopular, too, in part because it's hard to implement well and in part because no standard has emerged yet. Meanwhile, Virtual Reality Modelling Language remained a three-dimensional dream with a no-dimensional-audience. Hype 5: MULTIMEDIA!Multimedia? Shockwave, Macromedia's bandwidth-intensive multimedia format, didn't build momentum as expected. But Macromedia's acquisition of the year, the compact Flash vector-based multimedia tool and plug-in, may just have a future. That future depends largely on Flash keeping an edge over Dynamic HTML, now in early implementation by Microsoft and (less convincingly) Netscape. DHTML looks like it could become a real force on the Web - in a year or two's time. Big new technologies: WRITING! E-MAIL!The dominant technologies of 1997 turned out to be the same old things - text-based Web pages and e-mail. (Even hypertext began to look overhyped; don't even mention virtual community). The year's big gainers were two Netscape introductions from not 1997 but 1996 - HTML e-mail, which puts pictures in your messages, and JavaScript 1.1, which lets buttons react when you move your mouse over them. Even the change-obsessed Wired crew should have been able to predict the slowdown in the rate of change on the Web. The medium may have developed rapidly in its first two or three years. But now, with perhaps 90 million users world-wide, its continued evolution is limited by its own success. Satisfied users of Netscape 3.0 don't want to install plug-ins or Netscape 4.0 or Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.01 just to see the marginally improved interactivity of Dynamic HTML or ActiveX on a few cutting-edge sites. As this effect intensifies, the sites themselves will be less and less willing to stay at the cutting edge. And many of the features beloved of the techno-enthusiasts - such as video - will be held on a double rein, checked not just by the slowing pace of browser evolution but also by the slow growth in high-bandwidth networks such as cable in Australia and the US. Meanwhile, Wired's laying off staff. Turns out the Web isn't that different from the rest of the world after all
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When Advertising Age jumps off the bandwagon