- From: Charles McCathieNevile <charles@w3.org>
- Date: Sat, 28 Jul 2001 23:56:44 -0400 (EDT)
- To: David Woolley <david@djwhome.demon.co.uk>
- cc: <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
SMIL is supported in realplayer, which in turn is readily avilaable in most browsers. Sound is also supported in the Adobe SVG plugin - they provide an example of how it works. It uses some proprietary extension stuff, so it only happens for the SVG plugin from Adobe, but it does work with well-formed XML conforming to the specification and to namespaces in XML. I think that how to make sound available in a page is an accessibility technique, although I clearly acknowledge there is a tension where some users will want the sound, and some users will want the bandwidth saving of not getting it. (Sites that take forever to load can also pose problems, as Jonathan has noted elsewhere). It is true that there are problems in the way most browsers implement object (although it is now widespread in new browsers - Opera, iCab, Mozilla, IE, Netscape all deal with it in their latest versions, some well and some not so well). This actually raises an issue with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, so I have started a discussion thread there which can be followed in the archives from http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-gl/2001JulSep/0193 The issue is about interpreting the following checkpoint: 11.1 Use W3C technologies when they are available and appropriate for a task and use the latest versions when supported. [Priority 2] In particular, the question is whether W3C technologies (such as valid HTML) are available - in other words have they been correctly implemented and are they yet sufficiently widespread? I am not sure what the answer is, but part of it might be to look at a wider range of technoloogies than just HTML. We shall see what the group has to say... cheers Charles On Sat, 28 Jul 2001, David Woolley wrote: > > is the object tag supported by very recent browsers, at least nn6 or > mozilla0.9 and ie5.5 It's supported by both. However IE always treats it as a request for an external application when using sound, even when it would treat proprietory tags as internal and Mozilla doesn't have any intrinsic sound support, so also uses external players. (IE treats object as probable ActiveX, rather than in the way the HTML spec describes it.) SMIL is the minimum standard for doing multimedia sound with W3C technologies, but probably isn't available in any commercial browser. HTML is *not* an multimedia language although many browsers have pretentions of being multimedia viewers. How to do it isn't really an accessibility question. I'd suggest a general web authoring text book or comp.infosytems.www on usenet. I seem to remember that you make the file the data and supply the correct content type. I've never found a web site with background sound that works. The sound always starts so late as to be simply annoying. -- Charles McCathieNevile http://www.w3.org/People/Charles phone: +61 409 134 136 W3C Web Accessibility Initiative http://www.w3.org/WAI fax: +1 617 258 5999 Location: 21 Mitchell street FOOTSCRAY Vic 3011, Australia (or W3C INRIA, Route des Lucioles, BP 93, 06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France)
Received on Saturday, 28 July 2001 23:56:45 UTC