Re: HTML4.0 draft: Sound objects

On Mon, 8 Sep 1997, James Nerlinger, Jr. wrote:

> Many users and clients like the sounds

(Aren't you going a bit too far in the personalization of
intelligent Web clients? :-)

Many don't. Why not let each one make his own choice? Each user.
After all, it's the user (of a Web browser) whose ears are in danger
or receive the heavenly sounds.

> and it would be simpler to code them
> if we simply had a dedicated tag

Well we have, since the dawn of HTML, the anchor (A) tag. It's dedicated
to the purpose of providing links to different resources. It would be
better to have an attribute for specifying the media type, but that's
another story.

The proposed OBJECT element covers sounds, too. Whether it ever make sense
to embed a sound is debatable (I've never heard such an example so far),
but if it has to be done, the OBJECT certainly makes more sense than old
vendor-specific tags. Notice that using OBJECT you could specify _several
alternatives_ for presenting the same sounds in different formats
(different media types). 

> especially when browser and plug-ins
> can't seem to work together to produce the sound in a uniform way.  :(

Fix the browser. Or the HTML file. It sounds (!) that you are referring
to some effort of being clever in the sense of providing both IE and
Netscape tags for sounds, which may result in conflicts.

Yucca, http://www.hut.fi/home/jkorpela/

Received on Monday, 8 September 1997 10:38:34 UTC