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

The other difference between designer plug-ins and browser plug-ins is that browser plug-ins are as essential to the end-user as they are to the creator. Your client does not need KPT Filters to see the way you’ve blurred his logo in Photoshop, but web users need the Flash plug-in to view your Flash work, the Real plug-in to see and hear your Real-encoded video, and so on.

A Hideous Breach of Reality

Some plug-ins are true plug-ins, invisibly doing their work inside the browser. Others are more like free-standing players, though their manufacturers still refer to them as plug-ins, and most web designers call them that as well. Of course they should be called “helper applications” if they aren’t actually plug-ins, as they have been for years by persnickety people who also pronounce “GIF” correctly.

Still other multimedia add-ons can work either way. Depending on how you mark up your web page, Apple’s QuickTime plug-in can lurk in the shadows, invisibly playing embedded video and audio files right in the browser window (like a plug-in). It also can spawn an overly ornate steel-burnished console player that lies atop the browser window like a misbegotten Cadillac ornament (not like a plug-in).

To keep it simple and to annoy the overly precise among you, we will follow the manufacturers’ lead (as well as convention) and refer to all of these add-ons as “plug-ins,” whether they behave like true plug-ins or not.

The ubiquity of plug-ins

Plug-ins have been a fact of web life and web design since the mid-1990s. Why plug-ins? How did it happen?

In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth. A little later, the Web consisted of hyperlinked text. In the fullness of time, it became possible to include badly rendered images on web pages. This began to make the medium more attractive to creative and commercial enterprises, and there was soon a demand for sound, video, and other multimedia enhancements on the Web. There was also a demand for really good Chinese food in the American Midwest.