358 HOW: Beyond Text/Pictures: Turn on, Tune in, Plug-in

Promises, Promises

While SMIL is well-supported via plug-ins, SVG is still a work in progress— a promising work in progress, an exciting work in progress, but a work in progress. It will be widely adopted when it is further along in development and can be natively supported in browsers.

Do these tools, SMIL and SVG, pose an immediate threat to Macromedia Flash? They certainly do not. In fact, we don’t see them as anti-Flash technologies at all (though some might view them that way).

While SMIL is expanding and SVG is still taking shape, now would be a good time to download Adobe’s SVG plug-in and explore SMIL presentations and tutorials. Over the coming months, you will want to remain open-minded about these emerging standards and keep your eye on their evolution. Before we know it, they will likely be part of every web designer’s tool kit.

But in the meantime, you have a job to do. So let us turn our gaze to the Web’s de facto multimedia “standards” (which are not, technically speaking, web standards at all). Let’s consider the proprietary, often-maligned, sometimes-adored, widely used plug-ins that already bring rich multimedia experiences to hundreds of thousands of sites and hundreds of millions of web users.

TURN ON, TUNE IN, PLUG-IN

Plug-ins are the chief means by which web designers currently add sound and motion to the Web, and web users employ them to extend the capability of their browsers, allowing them to see and hear these sound and motion effects. Browser can’t play music? Pop in a plug-in. Browser can’t show vector graphics? Pop in a plug-in. Browser can’t show 360degree panoramic views of the client’s flagship $599 running shoe? Pop in a plug-in.

Taking Your Talent to the Web

359

Figure 12.7

Sony Classical, a site that Flash built. What it loses in accessibility, it gains in form and function.

Classical music greets the visitor as the site loads; as one piece of music replaces another, the company’s musical

offerings shift in the main window as though one were poring through record bins (http:// www.sonyclassical.com/). You can do some of this in HTML and JavaScript but not as smoothly or reliably.

For graphic designers, plug-ins are nothing new. If you want to create strange blurs in Photoshop, you can buy and install Kai Krause’s KPT Filters plug-ins. If you wish to work with preset masks in Photoshop, you’d purchase Extensis Photoframe. Photoshop and Quark have sparked entire industries devoted to creating such plug-ins. Plug-ins for web browsers function exactly like plug-ins for Photoshop and Quark, except that browser plug-ins are free. (Why are they free? How can they be free? We’ll get to that.)