Editor's note: Microsoft says its technologies let developers "Activate the Internet." But how many of the innovations it points to are really ActiveX, and how many are more familiar (and generic) Web protocols like CGI, animated GIFs, and cookies? Andrew Schulman takes a critical look behind the scenes of some ActiveX poster children.

If you read any of the web developer magazines such as Web Techniques, Web Developer, or Microsoft Interactive Developer, you've probably seen these ads Microsoft has been running over the past few months for ActiveX.

In one ad, a hip young web designer (he's doing the goatee thing) is standing in a pile of Kellogg's Corn Pops. His black T-shirt says "With ActiveX I can harvest Corn Pops, wing nuts and Detroit steel. What can you do?" Another ad has a hip young web designer (he's got the grunge shirt and those big black shoes) sitting amidst barrels with flames shooting out of them. The barrel he's sitting in has stencilled on it, "With ActiveX I can make you feel at home in Hell's Kitchen."

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Hell's Kitchen? It's a neighborhood on the west side of midtown Manhattan, one-time home of gangs such as the Gophers and the Westies, birthplace of Owney "Killer" Madden (a well-known gangster and owner of Harlem's "Cotton Club"), and site of West Side Story, "Slaughter on Tenth Avenue," On the Waterfront, and more recently of Sleepers, a controversial book (it's unclear whether it's true-crime or a novel) by Lorenzo Carcaterra that was recently made into a movie (see http://www.sleepers.com; there's also an interesting web page about the controversy, including links such as an angry response from the Catholic church).

The real-estate industry has tried to improve Hell's Kitchen's image, renaming it "Clinton" (that's De Witt Clinton, not Bill). As the ultimate sign of gentrification, there's even http://www.hellskitchen.com.

Truth In Advertising?
Now, I know it normally doesn't pay to devote much attention to ads. Anyone who is even vaguely familiar with the process by which advertising is created knows that, by the end of the process, there is usually little connection between the resulting ad and the product it's supposed to describe. Still, it is worth while every now and then to stop and look at these artifacts which have such an odd way of affecting even those who think they pay no attention to them.

So what does Hell's Kitchen have to do with ActiveX? In Microsoft's "Hell's Kitchen" ad, the featured web designer is Kevin Drew Davis, formerly of Blue Marble. The ad lists his "Magnum Opii": www.aptfone.com, www.sunnyd.com, and www.bluemarble.com. Microsoft explains:

"Apartment hunting in Manhattan. It used to be about as much fun as getting audited by the IRS. But now there's aptfone.com, the Web site that can make your next search for a pad in the concrete jungle (almost) fun. Credit this to Kevin, Blue Marble, and the ActiveX controls they've embedded in this awesome site."

If I'm reading the ad correctly -- and, I know, the point of an ad, from the advertiser's point of view anyway, is not at all to closely read it but instead to much more vaguely absorb it -- Microsoft is saying that ActiveX plays a fundamental role in this new way of finding an apartment in New York, maybe in Hell's Kitchen even. And, more generally, the "What can you do?" means that web designers can do cool, important, things with ActiveX.

Microsoft or its ad agency has then presumably chosen this New York apartment-finding web site as a good example of what can be done with ActiveX. Indeed, if you point a copy of Microsoft Internet Explorer (MSIE) at http://www.aptfone.com, you'll be greeted the first time with an Authenticode display indicating that an ActiveX control, Microsoft's HTML Layout Control 1.0, needs to be downloaded. Go for it, and you'll soon see an animated image map.

Moving your mouse over parts of the image map causes them to change slightly. There's a tiny yellow cab that cruises the bottom part of the image. Select "View-Source" from the MSIE menu, and you'll see an <OBJECT> tag corresponding to the ActiveX control.

Click on the billboard that says "Real estate listings," and you're taken to a map of the five boroughs. Click on Manhattan rentals, and you arrive at a form where you can select up to five neighborhoods. And, sure enough, one of the neighborhoods you can choose is "Hell's Kitchen." Truth in advertising!

There's something odd, though. Look at the page where you make your selection. It just looks like a regular HTML form. Where's the ActiveX? Select "View/Source" again, and this time there's no <OBJECT> tag. Instead it's a standard HTML <FORM> whose action points to a CGI program.

This would not be at all remarkable -- probably 99% of the "active" content on the web uses neither ActiveX nor Java, but instead employs the considerably simpler Common Gateway Interface (CGI) -- had not Microsoft selected this site as a prime example of ActiveX at work. The site is good, the CGI works fine, but if Microsoft is going to take part of the credit for finding you an apartment in Hell's Kitchen, ActiveX should be performing something more than its cosmetic role on the top-level page. Well, at least Microsoft isn't requiring first month's rent.

The guts of the site, the thing that will actually find you an apartment in Hell's Kitchen? That's all CGI. The site happens to be running O'Reilly's WebSite Professional server (this is easily verified with NetCraft's What's that site running? feature) and is using the Win-CGI interface written by WebSite's author, Bob Denny.

Got Milk?
So what could Microsoft's ad be referring to? The ad goes on to say:

"Among other things, users will spend less time downloading listings and can customize the site according to their unique housing needs. Using ActiveX is like having your own toolset to add animation and interactive functionality to your Web site."

{{I'm not sure why special attention has been given to cookies. The article is much more about CGI. So if cookies is highlighted like this, then CGI should be too. And animated GIFs. I added a link to Yahoo's excellent page on cookies, and one to the Win-CGI spec. Maybe need one to Richard's animated GIFs book?}}

In fact, the only ActiveX on this site is that pretty animated image map on the opening screen. If you turn off all ActiveX in MSIE ("View-Options-Security-Active content" -- notice, by the way, the subtle equation of ActiveX with "Active content"), your experience of the site is barely different. There's also little difference when viewing the site with a non-ActiveX browser such as Netscape Navigator -- and certainly no difference that's worth discouraging Netscape users from using the site. And not only is ActiveX providing merely a thin cosmetic layer to a single page, but the same superficial gloss could have been applied with boring, old industry standards: a client-side image map and a little JavaScript. The little yellow taxi could be an animated GIF.

How about the other ad, the one with the Corn Pops®? It features Adam Heneghan of Giant Step, and lists his "Magnum Opii" as www.giantstep.com, www.cornpops.com, www.truevalue.com, and www.oldsmobile.com. An impressive list of clients! Perhaps these will be good examples of ActiveX.

Well, it's pretty strange: both the Oldsmobile and TrueValue sites immediately redirect to index.cgi. For example, Oldsmobile has a CGI-based monthly payment calculator, and TrueValue has a CGI-based message board. There are some "Active Server Pages" (Microsoft's name for server-side scripting), but no ActiveX controls.

Microsoft's ad says "Visit Giant Step's Web site and you'll see several client logos literally take root and sprout across their homepage. It's just one of several cool controls Adam whipped up late one night in his Chicago design studio with the help of ActiveX."

When I go to the site -- which I guess is the whole point here: actually checking out the sites that Microsoft has adopted as ActiveX poster children) -- I don't see any client logos, but there's definitely a lot of sprouting and taking root. It looks pretty nifty. How'd they do that?! Must be ActiveX! Nope: it's an animated GIF.

The Kellogg's Corn Pops site has a bunch of amusing games you can play, such as Keep the Pops from Granny. And the Web page, sure enough, has an <OBJECT> tag. But within the <OBJECT> tag is an <EMBED> tag for a Netscape plug-in. It's not any sort of custom ActiveX control at all: just the Macromedia Shockwave player which is doing all the cool animation.

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Welcome to Potemkin Village
ActiveX's employment at these sites, in other words, is a façade, a Potemkin Village. According to the online Encyclopedia Britannica and Microsoft Encarta -- both of which are CGI-based, naturally -- Prince Potemkin in 1787, as governor of Crimea, organized Empress Catherine's tour of the newly-annexed province and is alleged to have erected false-front villages (sort of like Hollywood movie sets) along her route, to be seen by the Empress in passing. That sounds a lot like this ActiveX ad.

Okay, so what really are all these cool sites Microsoft claims to be examples of ActiveX controls at work? They're really examples of CGI, cookies, animated GIFs, and Shockwave. There's probably a fair amount of sheer incompetence here -- surely they could have found better examples of ActiveX somewhere -- but I do think a subtle point is trying to be made.

For one thing, Microsoft is pretending that any active content on the web is somehow an example of ActiveX. It's as though it was trying to establish a false equation "active content == ActiveX" in the minds of developers. Meanwhile, most of us understand ActiveX to mean ActiveX controls. Microsoft can, I suppose, say that CGI, cookies, animated GIFs, scripting, and so on are all part of ActiveX. It's good the company isn't so burdened by "not inventened here" prejudices. But pointing to CGI programs and animated GIFs as though they were ActiveX controls indicates a deep misunderstanding of the web, or an attempt to hoodwink developers into thinking they need Microsoft-specific technologies to do their work.

Since the day it woke up and became "hard core" about the Web, Microsoft's slogan has been "Activate the Internet." The implication being, of course, that without Microsoft the Web is static. An early article on what became ActiveX claimed that it "is to the current state of the Internet what Windows 3.1 was to MS-DOS."

I don't think there's any dishonesty here. Instead, I think Microsoft really doesn't get it -- "it" being the fact that ridiculously simple protocols like HTTP, HTML and CGI can take care of the vast majority of the problems that, for years, Microsoft has been telling us required hundreds of lines of Windows API code. We don't need Microsoft to "activate the Internet." It was already active, long before Microsoft arose from its slumber.

So it turns out there's no connection between Hell's Kitchen and ActiveX controls. Owney Madden can rest in peace.

Andrew Schulman (Santa Rosa CA) is the author of Unauthorized Windows 95 and coauthor of Undocumented Windows and Undocumented DOS. His forthcoming book, tentatively titled Grok the Web: A Programmer's Guide to the New Software Development Paradigm will be published by O'Reilly in 1997. He is a consulting editor for O'Reilly & Associates. His web site is http://www.sonic.net/~undoc and his email address is andrew@ora.com.