Δ Is it time to re-introduce sound to the web?

So long as any audio files you incorporate in your website are not auto-players, and there is a way to switch the sound off, sure, why not.

It was probably one of the first things you did when you first started playing with HTML, but background music, and funny sound effects when you clicked buttons, went the way of the spacer gif - web design matured, and web standards took over. But - now that “the web is the desktop”, and online applications become increasingly harder to tell apart from their OS-bound counterparts - can anyone remind me again just what is the compelling reason for not using sound effects on the web?

Back in the day when I did dabble with sound, which was pretty much during the height of the browser wars of the late 1990s, the main problems were related to file size, and the need for differing HTML code to make the files work in both Internet Explorer (IE) and Netscape Navigator (NN).

While both NN and IE (versions 3 and 4 respectivley) supported the embed tag, which was generally used to place audio files on web pages, they both had slightly different ways of playing the sound.

A read of Embedding Sound in Web Pages, Part I: The EMBED Tag, written in May 1998, by the way, sets out some the rendering differences between NN and IE.

Finding the “happy balance”, that is, tweaking the HTML is such a way that the sound file would behave the same way cross-browser (and cross-platform), tended to be problematic. If an audio file “worked” in NN, nothing would happen in IE.

Audio files also tended to be quite big, relatively speaking, considering most people were using dail-up connections ten years ago, so many readers had moved to another page before the sound file had even loaded.

I concluded that in 1998 the web was more a visual medium, that the time just wasn’t right for sound, even though applications such as Flash and Shockwave were about, and was quite happy to leave it at that.