Based on the first two weeks, 1998 looks to keep pace with 1997 in terms of rapid change, but let’s see how our last year predictions did.

1) The Apple/Next Merger.  Our Call: Nothing significant produced from Apple in the next 12 months. Guaranteed.  Reality:  Jobs pulled a profitable quarter out of his hat based on a fundamental restructuring of the company and the purchase of Power Computing.  In terms of new products, we were right on.  Rumours of Rhapsody continue to pop up around the net, but we’re still years from see the fruits of the merger.

2) Autonomous Agents.  Our Call: Cool buzz word, bad idea.  Reality: This term has quickly been replaced with ‘Bots.  The idea of the ‘Bot is they are simple, dumb programs which perform basic tasks on the net.  For example, ‘Bots police the infoscape of the IRC, maintaining channel decorum, kicking off pests, and preventing them from returning.  In reality, ‘Bots are nothing new, just a fancy name for a type of code that has been around for years.

3) Microsoft's Domination of the PC Market.  Our Call: Microsoft. Everywhere.  Reality:  Again, we hit the mark with Microsoft this year.  Even with slow acceptance of Windows 95, Microsoft continues to dominate the desktop of all PCs.  The recent DOJ action mostly confirmed what everyone already knew.  Microsoft hasn’t played fair in years, but who can blame them?  When you’re the only gig in town, you make the rules.

4) Netscape.  Our Call: Thanks to a diverse set of Internet servers and the forthcoming Communicator product, Netscape is going to have a solid year. Reality:  Netscape just announced it’s worse quarter ever and has already begun to lay off over 10% of its staff.  While rumors continue to fly around explain the reason for the quarter, CEO Barksdale appears to be taking the right actions by immediately cutting expenses and refocusing the company vision.  Industry watches will remember it took the 80’s darling Borland International three bad quarters before they cut into their staff.

5) VRML.  Our Call: VRML is, gee-whiz, not practical for the desktop.  Reality:  Yup.  We were right.

6) Push Technology.  Our Call: Before Push can shove, it needs to mature before it'll grab my processor cycles. You'll have to wait until the end of the year before a usable product surfaces.  Reality:  Push mostly burned out towards the end of ’97.  Unsuccessful launches of Netscape Netcaster and IE4’s Active Desktop  made it clear to most everyone that they didn’t want either company dominating their desktop.  Meanwhile, push pioneer, Pointcast, smelling impending doom decided to focus on narrow casting to specific demographics rather than compete in a market that may well be destroyed by the fact that most monitors shut off to save power after fifteen minutes.  These were the same monitors that used to advertise Pointcast so well.

7) American On-line.  Our Call: ISPs provide better connection kits to the Net, AOL members will bolt. Stay away from AOL stock. Reality:  We couldn’t have been more wrong.  With flat rate pricing in place and an upgrade to their massive network, AOL has taken off with shares hovering in the 90’s.  While AOL continues to be the mocked by hardcore geeks, remember, most of the nation isn’t trying to understand the ‘Net, they’re just trying to get their mail.  AOL’s simplicity makes it an easy way to get on the Internet.

8) Internet Indexes.  Our Call: Look for significant consolidation in this market during the next 12 months as Yahoo, Excite, and AltaVista continue their climb to the top by eating the little guys.  Reality:  While not a lot of consolidation occurred, the power structure in the Index world shifted while Yahoo! became the #1 site on the ‘Net while HotBot stole the technical crown from Alta Vista by becoming the most comprehensive and fastest index on the Web. (Thanks to Inktomi’s technology).

9) Geek burn-out.  Our Call: Look for a return to the 70's with a high tech "neo-hippie" attitude that will make it alright to relax.  Reality:  Strangely enough, this prediction (scheduled not to kick in until the turn of the century) came true in ’97.   Have you ever seen so many folks in corduroy in your life?  Do the Spice Girls not reek of some kind of twisted Brady Bunch?  The 70’s are here again and I’m not sure whether it was the geekdom or not, but we’ll be scratching our head for years to come.

Next Week: The Bitsifter predictions for ’98.

[sift this]  This marked the second year that I gave a web site as a gift for Christmas.  The first present went over well, but rarely changed over the course of the year.  It turned out that while the spirit was willing, the tools just weren’t there.  This year, someone figured it out.

Two significant problems arose when my first gift went online.  The first was the lack of sophisticated HTML editor.  No matter how much bleeding edge publishers stamp their feet and proclaim that ‘HTML is easy dammit, all you need is a decent text editor’, the fact remains that people believe in WYSIWIG.  When they want to design a table, they care nary a bit for the syntax of HTML tables.  They simply want to drag and drop.

The second problem arose from a hardware scarcity.  While friends have thrown their money together into bandwidth co-ops, most folks with half a clue about the work involved in maintaining a meaningful site don’t have a web server in-house.  They’re also enlightened enough to realize that free web space is selling yourself to the advertisers.  You gotta own the domain, baby.  Still, if you own it, you gotta maintain it and while FTP suits we nerds of the mighty command line, the Dad, again, wants a stellar interface that does most of the work for him.  He does not want to maintain his links, he doesn’t really care about version control, and if he has to start typing in commands to a cryptic prompt, well, he won’t.

Two tools have emerged during the year which, thankfully, make all of jobs a lot easier.  They also ensure that my Christmas gifts, this year, may avoid bit rot.

Dreamweaver.  My current HTML development tool.  From the mysterious land of Macromedia.  The folks who keep try to define the future, but end up adapting their tools to someone else’s idea of the future.  Their patience paid off big time with the arrival of Dreamweaver.  It’s strongest feature is the fact that every possible HTML extension is supported and supported in a manner which allows designers to be creative rather than to stumble around syntactical conventions.

Why is the world has Netscape or Microsoft owned this market?  Why do they keep releasing new HTML viewers, but crappy HTML editors that never support their newest features?  Simple, it’s harder to write a layout engine with editing capabilities than one that is simply read-only.  Netscape hedged their bet by trying to adapt their current layout technology to exist as an editor, but failed.  Microsoft said screw it and did the sensible thing by running out and purchasing the FrontPage folks.  (see below)

The Macromedia techies actually wrote their own layout engine.  Dreamweaver’s WYSIWIG capabilities are utterly astounding.  Tables behave.  Forms are trivial.  Frames are right there at your fingertips.  And, get this; they circumvented the browser wars by supporting both Netscape’s and Microsoft’s Dynamic HTML.  Somebody send these guys a peace prize, they’ve earned it.  Better yet, download the free 30-day demo.  I promise you’ll instantly fall in the love with the product.

The second half of the productivity equation was the ability to maintain a web site.  While the package has been around for years, FrontPage 98 represents the best tool for web masters who may not exactly know what the web is.  In typical Microsoft fashion, some of FrontPages best features involve its ability to migrate users from “their” way to the “Microsoft” way.  In seconds, the Dad and I imported the existing site to FrontPage.  In a few minutes more, we drastically altered the directory structure of the site, added new pages, and not once touched a piece of HTML code.  A minute later, the site was back on our favorite ISP’s server.

Much of the magic is done by the fact that our ISP supports FrontPage’s server extensions.  This allows designers to simply click the publish button and let the client machine negotiate with the server as to what needs to be uploaded, changed, etc.  The ability to understand what the ISP’s server did for the Dad was unnecessary; it was completely hidden beneath FrontPage’s warm and cozy interface.

FrontPage sports a solid editor, as well.  They’ve borrowed NetObject’s idea of shared borders and automatically generated navigation borders.  Also, they’re implementation of table and frame editing leaves little to chance.  While Dreamweaver lacks the sophisticated web management tools, they still dominated FrontPage in the arena of supporting DHTML, Layers, and advanced scripting.

Either tool is going to leave you in awe.  Both tools “just work”.  It’s amazing that it’s 1998, four years after we first saw the wave of the Internet headed our way and it’s taken that long for software developers to release tools that will bring the art of web design to everyone.