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Netscape: Ship of Fools?

Thinking ahead about Netscape Plug-Ins

By Rayme Jernigan, JavaWorld.com, 05/01/96

When it comes to extending HTML to offer more content on the Web, developers and users have quite a few choices. Perhaps the two most likely options are Sun Microsystems' Java and Netscape's plug-ins for Navigator.

Netscape Navigator 2.0 and subsequent versions support Java and can run Java applets. Navigator also supports helper applications, which it launches when needed to deal with data Navigator can't handle on its own. And more recently, Navigator lets users install plug-ins to do the job.

Developers may develop, and sometimes port, existing code fairly easily to the Netscape Plug-In API. Just a bit of code modification may do the trick. To take advantage of such applications within Navigator, users must simply obtain and install the plug-in version of the applications. These plug-ins can be thought of as subroutines that operate within the browser itself -- without launching a helper application.

Alternatively, companies can rewrite their applications in Java -- a more daunting task. The resulting applets can then be viewed automatically in Navigator (or any Java-enabled Web browser).

Plug-ins are very nice, so what's the problem? Why use Java when a plug-in gets the job done with less effort?

Paradigm split

The computing universe is separating itself into two paradigms: Desktop-centric computing, and network-centric computing.

In desktop-centric computing, computing as most have known it for the last decade, the software and the data are artificially separated. The user interacts with the data from a static desktop environment, and data formats need to be anticipated in order to interpret the data. You need a JPEG viewer before you can view a JPEG file, for example.

This may work satisfactorily in a closed environment, but on the Internet it's a problem. There is really no way of knowing what you'll find until you find it.

Most of the Netscape plug-ins belong to the familiar class of translator utilities and document viewers that permit a Babble of content types to coexist (often uncomfortably) on the same desktop. The philosophy seems to be, "If you can't always know the formats in advance, prepare yourself for all the eventualities you can think of, and hope for the best."

There is, for example, a Netscape plug-in called Figleaf Inline (from Carberry Technology/EBT) that lets you dynamically zoom, pan, and scroll many image formats, including CGM, GIF, JPEG, PNG, TIFF, CCITT GP4, BMP, WMF, EPSF, Sun Raster, and RGB.

Jumping through hoops

If you are a content provider and want to display, flip, and rotate vector graphics on your Web site, which format should you choose? You could depend on users to handle your format with the aforementioned plug-in. But if you do, you sharply narrow your "unprepared" audience by requiring that they pause to first determine the prerequisite plug-in, locate and obtain it, and then install it before seeing your content. Not everybody has one of these plug-ins, and some plug-ins aren't available for all types of computers and operating systems. Since typically much of the traffic on the Web is unplanned, you can expect many visitors surfing your site will move on rather than jump through hoops.

 

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