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To plug, or not to plug ...Free "plug-ins" which quietly and unfussily extend the capabilities of your Web browser seemed a great idea when Netscape introduced them in with Navigator 2.0. Now, a year or so on, programmers have created dozens, for everything from playing sounds (RealAudio, Toolvox, TrueSpeech) to multimedia presentations (Macromedia Shockwave) to reading Web pages in foreign languages (Navigate With An Accent). Microsoft has adapted Internet Explorer to support them. A $70 book from Waite Group Press, Jonathon Angel's Web Publisher's Construction Kit with Netscape Plug-ins shows how to use plug-ins in your pages. No-code Web publishers like Microsoft FrontPage and Claris HomePage cater happily to them. So Web page builders are asking: should we use them? Which ones? Dr Thom Puckett, a regular visitor to this site, e-mailed me recently to sing the praises of ToolVox, a plug-in which compresses voice at rates of over 50:1, allowing rapid downloads. A specialist tool, ToolVox doesn't compress music well but is ideal for someone wanting to back up pictures with narration or echo the written word with the spoken word. The plug-in and the compression software are both free and much-admired; Microsoft is licensing Voxware's compression technology for use in its NetShow 2.0 product (though not for its Internet Explorer browser). Dr Puckett teaches at Melbourne's La Trobe University, is interested in on-line education and uses ToolVox as a teaching aid. Plug-ins work well in such specialist applications, as they do on organisations' intranets. But should designers adopt ToolVox or similar plug-ins for work at a site out on the mass-market, casual-surfer Web? Almost certainly not. Here's why. Right now, the state of the mass-market Web audience (running mostly 486 and Pentium machines and their Apple equivalents with 14 and 33kb/second modems) leaves two types of presentations demanding plug-ins: sound and multimedia. Video will join these two, but only when ISDN, ADSL and cable bring can bring signal to a large number of desktops at 100kb/second or more. The shocking reality of plug-insThere's a grim economics to plug-ins - the economics of installation time, hassle and hard disk space. and effort. To convince people to invest that time and effort and space, plug-ins must let you do something you want to do, but which you can't do with the browser alone. And they must let you do it at plenty of sites, which means they have to have captured the interest of site developers. Site developers, of course, want to use plug-ins which people have already installed on their computers ... How do you solve this chicken-and-egg conundrum? Easy: get to market quickly a compelling sound or multimedia package. And that game is long over. The winners have been Internet pioneers Progressive Networks and Macromedia, makers of RealAudio and Shockwave. Between them, on my completely unscientific estimates, these two account for 90 per cent of the plug-in material on the Web, and probably more than 90 per cent of the plug-ins installed on people's machines. That's great news for Progressive Networks and Macromedia, and lousy news for the makers of ToolVox, TrueSpeech player, Astound and all sorts of other plug-ins. It's also rotten news for Web designers. RealAudio compresses sound files substantially. However, it requires not only the RealAudio encoder, which creates the sound files that the browser plug-in reads, but also the RealAudio server software, whose prices start at well over $A600 and which has to be installed on the server which hosts your Web site. Macromedia Shockwave can utilise material created with the company's standard-setting Director program, and allegedly compresses sound files even more spectacularly than RealAudio, by about 170:1. But Director costs $1300 - more if you want the complete Multimedia Studio - and demands you learn its Lingo scripting language to exploit all its features. Nevertheless, the top Web site designers have adopted these two (many already knew Director well) and no cheaper plug-in platform stands a chance. (The only good news is that RealAudio allows for low-volume RealAudio usage through a free though imperfect system called "pseudo-streaming".) Few surfers with RealAudio and Shockwave already installed will download another plug-in just for voice applications, so few Web designers will bother catering to them, so few Web surfers will ... you get the idea. The technically excellent and cheap-to-use ToolVox and that mass of other plug-ins will remain niche applications. Going down the drainAnd eventually they'll fade away. The hurdle for up-and-coming plug-ins is being raised even higher by the inclination of Netscape and Microsoft to co-opt the best plug-ins into their browsers. Netscape's Navigator 3.0 and higher build in a plug-in called LiveAudio to play sound files, though it provides no compression/decompression. And Netscape's Australian chief, Clive Mayhew-Begg, said last week that Netscape was working with 30 vendors, including RealAudio, to create a single sound compression standard. Meanwhile, Internet Explorer 3.0 natively supports RealAudio 2.0. Shockwave seems likely to be built into both major browsers in the next year or two. And Java - slow, browser-crashing, not-quite-cross-platform, much-hyped Java - may soon overtake the lot of them and become a useful tool for Web presentations. A"ll plug-in development is moving towards Java applets," says Mr Mayhew-Begg. His verdict on plug-ins, just 18 months after his company created them? "The technology has certainly been surpassed".
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RealAudio