The Speed of Technology

Posted by Morven on 19 February 2007 | 0 Comments

It has come to my attention recently that in web world certain programming technologies are progressing at a far greater speed than some of the systems we use to process and view them.

In this instance I am referring to a project recently undertaken that required some "fancy effects" to happen on the site after a user click. Flash could not be used and so the only other option available was JavaScript, using some special effects plugins. The idea of these is quite cool, they allow you to add extra functionality and effects to a website without needing to use Flash or some form of multimedia software.

The plugins themselves though are a quite new technology and it seems that some firewalls you can buy block them, even though they still enable JavaScript. It also seems that the exact firewalls doing this are quite random.

In retrospect, working with these plugins can be very rewarding and produce websites with very clean flash free sites. The downside is that any user with a firewall could find themselves missing out on what you have produced. Overall I would say that if you want to use one of these plugin effects libraries research who the site is for thoroughly as there are no published figures for how many firewalls block them. If a lot of users are going to be behind intricate firewalls then it may be worth looking somewhere else until this problem is solved. In this instance the programmers making these plugins appear to be outpacing the firewall makers.

It seems a classic Tortoise and the Hare race, but in this situation I hope the Hare comes in first.