What is an interactive element? For purposes of this section, I am defining it as a way to cause visitor to a web site to interact with either other visitors or webmaster. Examples include email forms, chat scripts and games. You can also add tools such as dictionary lookup boxes, weather reports and code generators.

If you are a beginning webmaster, if you are creating a simple homepage or if you do not have access to server-side scripting (a method to cause web server to do tasks for you), then what you will need to do is find outside services to host your interactive capabilities. These services can be bought (usually for a minor fee) or will will be free and display ads.

The advantages of free services are that they are free, relatively bullet-proof (usually) and generally straightforward to use. The major disadvantage is that they must make money indirectly through use of advertisements. Sometimes this is just a simple banner, and more obnoxious services remove your visitor totally from your website and plant them on theirs. The other disadvantage is you tend to lose visitors by using these free services, as it is their goal to get them to click on an advertisement, not to get people to stay on your site.

The concept is simple, and benefits are tremendous. Create an "engine" with basic functionality and allow for expansion by third-parties in a standard and organized way. Thus, for example, even though Adobe Photoshop performs an incredibly number of functions all on it's own, authors felt it was necessary to allow others to contribute their skills. They did this by providing plug-ins and filters.

This also, not entirely coincidentally, got around concept of "open source" which has been debated all over internet for years. Pure open source is code which can be downloaded and modified by anyone - Unix is a good example of this. At other extreme is virtually all of Microsoft's products - sources are not made available to anyone except under specific and [legally] controlled circumstances. Plug-ins get around this argument by allowing product to be expanded and it's behavior changed without releasing source code to general public.

The concept of plug-ins actually came into reality back in 1995. The Netscape browser developers had a problem - there were few, if any, accepted graphics and multimedia (videos, sound and such) standards available on web, yet browser had to be capable of displaying graphics and multimedia. The developers did not want to restrict their browser to just a few standards (which may or may not have become accepted) and they certainly did not want to release a new browser every time a new multimedia format was created.

Thus plug-ins were born. This solved problem very well. There was now no need to restrict formats or modify and distribute a new browser. All that needed to be done was create a plug in which handled format. And best of all (for Netscape) this plug-in was generally created by some other company.

There were problems with plug-in concept, however.

- Back in days of slow modems, it could take a very long time to download a plug-in

- Plug-ins could crash operating system or cause it to become unstable.

- If a visitor chose not to install a plug-in, then multimedia object would not display.

- Malicious designers could conceivably introduce security risks through use of plug-ins.

Soon afterwards Microsoft got on bandwagon with it's own version of plug-ins for Internet Explorer. They called their version ActiveX and made them a little more automatic (by adding some custom code to operating system). Ask anyone at Microsoft (especially at training classes) and you be told that future is ActiveX. However, these controls have exactly same problem as plug-ins with a terrible security model to boot (any security model which requires an end-user to make a decision as to whether or not unknown code is trustworthy is certain to fail).