Re: inline sounds

Dave_Raggett (dsr@hplb.hpl.hp.com)
Wed, 8 Dec 93 9:57:48 GMT

>I guess if I had to vote (and why not, this is my posting, eh?) I
>would play the sound on-the-fly as the surrounding text is being
>rendered for the screen, AND place a little sound icon where the tag
>is in the text so that the user can replay at will. The rule would be
>that whenever the icon has to be rendered for display it would be
>played as well (unless deferred playing is turned on)

My wish would be for an ability to play a sound sequence as an
accompanyment to following a normal hypertext link. This way the
music/speech is synchronised to the change in the document display.
This is not the same as playing a sound sequence when first displaying
a document, since the link might have been to another section within
the same document.

To get this to work, we need an additional URL attribute in the <A>
and <LINK> elements. How about something like:

<A HREF="#prologue" PLAY="fanfare.au">The Prologue</A>

I have used PLAY here rather than say SOUND since we may want to invoke
some animation e.g. a talking head in front of the main document rather
than just a simple sound sequence.

Another idea is to extend the LINK element to cause the browser to "turn
the page" after a specified time-out, e.g.

<LINK HREF="next_doc" AFTER=10>

The AFTER attribute specifies a delay of 10 seconds after which, if the
user hasn't done anything, the browser will follow the link specified with
the HREF attribute.

Dave Raggett