HTML5, JavaScript, and jQuery 24-Hour Trainer

Lesson 22

HTML5 Audio

The third section of the book will cover many of the multimedia enhancements added in HTML5, beginning with HTML5's audio capabilities.

Audio has been part of the web almost since browsers first appeared but, unlike images that are natively supported by the browser, audio support has always been provided by third-party plugins such as QuickTime. Browser plugins are supported by the HTML object tag, and are used to support a wide selection of media types such as audio, video, PDF files, and animations.

There are a number of problems with plugins, however:

• They often rely on the user installing a plugin manually, and this can be an inconvenience for users. Additionally, users are typically required to update plugins independently of the browser's update cycle, which can lead to further frustration.
• Plugins can effectively do anything they want on the computer running the browser (or at least, anything that the browser could do). This presents a security loophole, and has been exploited on many occasions.
• Plugins can cause stability issues in browsers because a bug in a plugin can cause the browser to crash.
• Plugins are not standards-based for the most part, and therefore they encourage lock-in to proprietary formats.

In order to counteract these issues, HTML5 supports an audio tag (along with a video tag, as you will see in the next lesson). The audio tag is intended to remove the need for plugins, and has begun to find widespread adoption.

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