Audio and Video
For a very long time, browsers had no built-in support for playing audio and video content, save for an obscure and oft-ridiculed <bgsound> tag in Internet Explorer, which to this day can be used to play simple MID or WAV files. In the absence of real, cross-browser multimedia playback functionality, audio and video were almost exclusively the domain of browser plug-ins, whether purpose-built (such as Windows Media Player or Apple QuickTime) or generic (Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, and so on).
The ongoing work on HTML5 seeks to change this through support for <audio> and <video> tags: convenient, scriptable methods to interface with built-in media decoders. Unfortunately, there is substantial vendor-level disagreement as ...
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