I find the <BGAUDIO> tag to be a nice feature, if you keep the audio files
to a reasonable size (like 20K or less). MIDI files are also a nice touch,
and they seem to fit in well with the Web philosophy. MIDI is a publicly
available standard, the files are small in size, and how they sound depends
on the client platform. I only wish more Unix platforms supported it. They
also come down even a 14.4 V.42bis pipe quickly, since they are highly
compressible.
How would HTML v3 handle "inline audio", if it can at all? Would <FIG> do
this? If not, can someone think of a better way of handling it that could
be added to the proposed standard? As it stands, it seems pretty
straightforward to me:
<BGAUDIO SRC="file.[wav|au|mid]" LOOP="[n|0|INFINITE]">
where 0 and INFINITE mean the same thing, and n is a positive integer. The
only thing I might want to add to it is an attribute that says "keep playing
or looping this audio file while viewing children of this page" until the
file finishes, or the loop count is reached, or another <BGAUDIO> tag is
encountered. Um, might be a good idea to discontinue playback if the user
leaves the site entirely, too. :)
You can take all the rest of the MS HTML extensions and throw them in the
bit-bucket. But I like this one.
-- %%%%%% mikebat@abs.net %%%%%% http://www.abs.net/~mikebat/ %%%%%%