On The Perplexing Prevalence Of Plug-Ins...

Element5 asks: "Recently I've noticed more and more Web pages are requiring plug-ins to be viewed at all. Most notable of these such pages are movie sites. Some sites are built entirely with Director or Flash (I only use Flash as an example as it is seemingly the most prevalent plug-in requirement out there). Am I the only one who finds this trend disturbing? It's almost as if Web site developers are skipping the whole process of learning HTML entirely and instead rely on an authoring tool based on a proprietary technology. Don't get me wrong, Macromedia's products are fantastic ones; but I'd much rather see them used in throw-away aspects of a Web site that can be dropped if a user doesn't have the plug-ins, or on a site which also hosts an HTML version with exactly the same features. At any rate, I'm just wondering what other people think about this trend." Read on...

I too understand the frustration behind encountering sites like this. I understand that it's hard work to create and maintain sites with multiple "versions" for browsers of varying capabilities, but I thought the primary purpose of a Web site was to make oneself seen, and wouldn't it make sense to make yourself seen by the lowest-common-denominator before adding all of the glitz and chrome? Would a static version of a site that makes extensive use of Flash be that hard to design, especially since most of the key artwork should have been done for the animation?

Comments

Re:most people have the plugins...

[Robert S Gormley]

Go on, enlighten us.

Re:Use Flash because it's the best solution?

[Alex Belits]

By linking segments of them to zoomed images, and using any of 65535 possible ways to implement a scrolling on the zoomed ones.

The /real/ problem with plugins...

[yellowstone]

1. They are too often closed-source trojans to gather personal information for the marketing department (and yes, even once is too often for me)

2. There are far too many "multimedia plugins", all incompatable with each other.

3. The plugin developers are constantly releasing new versions with kewl new features, which mean that people are creating content to use the kewl new features, which means the plugin you just downloaded to view content using the lame old features is now obsolete. Time to download the latest version (which will be obsolete moments after you finish downloading).

4. And once you plow through the junk so you can finally see the "multimedia content", it turns out to be incredibly lame... :=P

I used to listen to spinner.com, but the last time I started the client and got the sorry, you must upgrade to the latest version message, I finally decided it was in no way worth it and just uninstalled.

-y

Just Say No

[Tackhead]

...to plugins.

http://www.anybrowser.org

Because...

"Anyone who slaps a 'this page is best viewed with Browser X' label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network."

- Tim Berners-Lee.

Nuff said.

Re:Just Say No

[Tackhead]

> You seem to be invoking the "holy internet principles" again; a common malady [among slashdotters]

Guilty as charged ;)

That said, the people on the other side of this debate seem to be invoking an opposit sense of holy principles: "why don't you want to spend all your life downloading and installing flaky closed-source plugins and customizing your browser to our marketing department's whims".

I posit that yours is an equally common malady among marketroids.

If your target market is only users who have high-bandwidth connections and who use IE99.9 with all the latest privacy-invading closed-source trojans and plugins, by all means, design for them and tell anyone whose User-Agent doesn't measure up to your standards to go to hell.

But don't be surprised if your server logs start seeing references to pages like "you_lost_a_customer.html" from people who only wanted to buy stuff from you, but whom you deemed unworthy.

Designing for only one browser or requiring a custom plugin is fundamentally no different than telling someone "Looky heah, boah, this heah's a Whites Only wat'rin hole! Y'all gawddamn Nig^H^Hetscape usahs kin jest git to th'back of th'bus!"

While I'd be the last person to argue that browser-discrimination is anywhere near as important as race discrimination, I believe the analogy holds: You "never signed off on any internet principles" - that's fine, I agree you're free to discriminate on any criteria you wish, I'd love to hear your business case for it.

I'm serious here -- what are you doing that's so special that Netscape users shouldn't see it? Or that people on Macintoshes, IRIX boxes, or Suns shouldn't see? With user attention spans measured in seconds, what makes your site so important that I should want to spend 5 minutes (or 20 minutes!) downloading a plug-in, or that I should have to stop what I'm doing to fire up a different web browser, or that I should have to get up and walk over to an officemate's Wintel box to see it? Or even that I should have to lift a finger for the three or four mouse clicks to enable Java/Javascript?

When you design for accessibility, you maximize the size of your potential market. In business, a larger potential market is generally considered a good thing, and it has nothing to do with sound bites from Tim.

Bottom line: If your site won't let me shop or browse at it until I bow to your marketing department's whims, there are plenty of sites who will. They'll get my money and traffic instead.

Lazy

[1DeepThought]

Although I think things like flash have their place, I think the biggest problem is lazy or unskilled designers. These deigners have been brought up in the FrontPage / DreamWeaver generation and know no better or they have gotten lazy and jump for the easy gui tool at any opportunity.

Re:Use Flash because it's the best solution?

[Alex Belits]

Writing a sample -- when finished it will be somewhere at phobos.illtel.denver.co.us, I will post the URL.

Re:Use Flash because it's the best solution?

[Alex Belits]

A prototype, that I have hacked together in php is at http://www.illtel.denver.c o.us/~abelits/floor/floor.php3" (see source.

Images are produced from xfig diagram (in this example very primitive one) cut into 200x200 squares, and php script displays them in 3x3 "tiled" maps in "zoomed" mode, or another image produced from the same diagram in the "whole floor" mode. "Whole floor" image could be generatred with less details, however I was too lazy to do that -- in this example it's just all tiles, scaled down.

In both modes clicking on any area on the map leads to tiled 3x3 "zoomed" image with the clicked tile in the center. Images are never re-downloaded if they fit in the cache, and only html is generated dynamically.

Of course, this is a proof-of-concept prototype, and any real design can feature additional scrolling controls, additional areas on the imagemap that lead to objects displayed on them (say, clicking on the room with known detailed description and map shows that map instead). Also 3x3 tiles per "viewport" can be too small, real map probably should be displayed with more tiles. Still, it works, displays well in all browsers (including lynx, if it can call image viewer to view images separately), and can be extended to more zooming levels "recursively".

Opinions about Flash

[Pseudonymus Bosch]

Browsing Jakob Nielsen's UseIt.com, I found a link (2000-06-01) to a Flash-oriented site warning about bad uses of Flash, A Cancer on the Web called Flash . This warns about gurus starting to think that all Flash is evil.
__

Re:Use Flash because it's the best solution?

[Alex Belits]

The reason we're using Flash, however, is because it's the best option out there. The requirement was to deliver an interactive floorplan for trade-shows to the browser: it had to be zoomable, moveable, fast and respond to clicks. Given this, Flash seemed like the best option, especially since SVG support is currently nigh-on non-existent (actually, having said that, Adobe have released an SVG ... plugin. Hmm).

Client-side image maps implement this functionality perfectly -- and client-side image maps made by literate people will even work in Lynx (user will see all links, and will be able to get images if he cares to look at them). If you don't know this, you have no business maintaining a web site, and now you are just wasting your employer's (and customers') money.

Re:May'be not the only one...

[Stonehead]

Sorry, I'm a Lynx user and I couldn't resist to answer..

a. Writing HTML is too expensive. Web-authoring tools should use the lowest common denominator, which are the W3C standards for HTML. I don't blame you for using Frontpage, I blame tools for using bad HTML.

b. Plugins such as shockware are common. Maintaining 2 versions of a site is not efficient. Javascript is common too. So what? I can visit most Javascript-sites with Lynx perfectly, as long as the content is HTML. Javascript should be used for page style, not for encoding content. There's a reason that Slashdot headlines aren't animated GIFs..
Will I ever convince you? The majority of Internet users thinks that HTTP == Internet, they log in to visit a playground. Anyway, I will not upgrade in the next 2-3 years. I expect you to have a decent web page. If not, I won't visit your page. It is as simply as that. 5% may not be much, but you might want to take that extra cost once you realize how much 5% of a few million visitors is.

Overdoing it all

[simpleguy]

Overuse of plugins has always been bad.
Some websites require flash not for decorative content but critical stuff like navigating within the website.

Others have JAVA navigation bars. Generally, I surf with javascript/java disabled so as to avoid the popups and reduce the risk of netscape crashing on me.

There are other plugins that just SUCK. An example is vivo. While vivo movies are small, have you ever tried seeking a specific spot in a vivo movie? Tried rewinding or fast forwarding? I downloaded a couple of anime movies in vivo and whenever I need to re-view a specific portion, I need to see the WHOLE movie over again.

This is a typical case where I would prefer Real content or the plain old mpeg 1 format.

Web designers, remember that not everyone has feature-packed browsers. There are times I need to download something but wait... I want to do that on my shell account with wget. Duh! I need to have java/javascript enabled or some other fancy plugin to even ENTER the site.

Please, if you really really need to design a whole website in flash or director or whatever plugin, consider making a 'normal html' version also. PLEASE.

Some of you might argue that we are no longer in the console days and I am just old-coloured. Thats up to you. I will be just one less visitor to your site, right? Who cares about the small minority of die-hard geeks who love lightweight, console (insert favourite) stuff? We are still users who wish to visit your website. Consider us.

Awaiting nods of approval and/or flames.

Re:Overdoing it all

[Robert S Gormley]

Okay, this irks me:

Others have JAVA navigation bars. Generally, I surf with javascript/java disabled so as to avoid the popups and reduce the risk of netscape crashing on me.

Your chosen browser handles Java(script) badly, ergo designer should forego to suit your choice?

This is inverted logic. *sigh*

most people have the plugins...

[Capt Dan]

Quite frankly, most web users in the world are using windows with netsacpe or IE.

Current versions of netsacpe and IE either:
1) ship with these plugins (if they are popluar enough) or
2) will automatically down and install them without the user having to do anything (not even a reboot!)

Sure html is great. I remember writing up pages back in the day with notepad.

But in this day and age where a lot of money is put into designing cool sites that will bring people back, designers are going to go with whatever lets them create glitz and flash. Especially when 95+% of their users have or can easily get the necessary plugins.

How important are these plugins? I have a very knowledgeable friend that designs web pages usign flash script. Bright guy, geek, runs linux at home etc. Last month he point blank told me that "Flash 4.0 will bury html"

You can complain about it all you want, but it isn't going away. Maybe mozilla will have some kind of easy plugin porting layer so *nix users can get plugins faster.


"You want to kiss the sky? Better learn how to kneel." - U2

Re:most people have the plugins...

[Robert S Gormley]

And these arrogant wankers talk out of their arses just as much.

Design. Development. Not synonymous. And not many people in the industry these days think they are.

Our companies online dept (and it's a big one), has three groups of people - designers, who mock sites up in PhotoShop, developers, who code COM objects, PHP or whatever is required for the site into simple pages, and integrators who marry the two.

Why would a designer want to create a web page from a database using a scripting language without the use of HTML? I'll ignore the fact that this is an impossibility anyway. Mmm, I'd love to see your text/plain websites. (And don't say they use XML or somesuch).

Plugins are not indexable

[Pseudonymus Bosch]

Another point I forgot:

HTML is indexable. Flash and Java are not, PDF could be, I guess.

How will your targets find you in the enormous web if your pages don't appear in search engines?
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The future will be slower

[Pseudonymus Bosch]

In the next 2-3 years we expect those users to have upgraded

That's not what I was told. In the coming years, expect people trying to access your pages from mobile phones and TV sets ("What do you mean "my TV Internet box is old"? It's only 5 years old!") and exotic countries with bad connections. Of course, you may not be interested in them.
But for a general-purpose site you should have in mind slow connections and crude interfaces.

Beware of the Boo.com.
__

I can understand it

[vrt3]

While I am somebody who prefers content over appeareance, there are lots of graphical-minded people who would like to make fancy flashy sites. And I think they have the right to do so. Doing this is very difficult using HTML, Java, Javascript and DHTML, especially if you want your site to work cross-browser.
A nice graphical site can, however, quite easily be obtained using Flash. And since there are Flash players for about any platform one can think of, it works instantly on a complete range of systems. And it's resolution-independent, since it's vector based.
I agree that there are a lot of sites out there with annoying length animations, but when Flash is used for a nice looking site and without lots of animations, well, I don't mind. I used to though, but I changed jobs a few months ago and now I'm convinced by one of my colleagues, a graphical kind of guy.

Example: http://www.show2000antwerp.org is a site which, I think, is quite well suited to it's target audience and has nice graphics, without any cross-browser problems.

Re:May'be not the only one...

[Rombuu]

a. Writing HTML is too expensive. Web-authoring tools should use the lowest common denominator, which are the W3C standards for HTML. I don't blame you for using Frontpage, I blame tools for using bad HTML.

Bah, if you are so concerned about the guy with the 286, no graphics, and a 1200 baud accoustic coupled modem, put the information on your gopher site.... hahahahahaha...

The right tool for the job.

[mcramer]

And what content exactly were you expecting from the Mission Impossible: 2 website? If a website is worth visiting, they can most often be trusted to do the right thing. And sometimes the right thing is a full page Flash animation. It works more reliably than most DHTML and uses a reasonable amount of resources on the client side and a fair amount of bandwidth on the way down. No matter how good a JavaScript programmer you are, the George Liqour Program is probably still better done in Flash.

That's not to say I support creating entire sites in Flash...That's dumb too. But anyone with content worth looking at is probably going to pick the right tool for the job. And if they make a mistake, send them a nice email and they probably will fix it (or at least think twice before doing it again!)

Search engines

[Arjen]

The most serious problem with proprietary plugins is that the pages that use them are not indexable by search-engines.

So even though the text in that nice Flash page may be cool to look at, it is impossible to find it via your favorite search engine.