[whatwg] Audio Interface

Ian Hickson ian at hixie.ch
Fri Aug 3 18:00:28 PDT 2007


On Fri, 21 Apr 2006, Jeff Schiller wrote:
>
> I have some questions/suggestions to the Web Apps 1.0 Audio Interface 
> (http://whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#scs-sound) before it 
> takes off in too many browsers:
> 
> 1) "The Audio() constructor takes a single argument, a URI (or IRI), ... 
> which returns an Audio object that will, at the completion of the 
> current script, start loading that URI."
> 
> I guess "current script" means "the script statement which created the 
> Audio object" and not "the entire script".

It meant the latter, actually, but this has now been revamped anyway.


> 2) Can you clarify the mechanism to determine if a user agent supports a 
> particular content type?  Otherwise, as a developer do I just assume 
> that every browser will support .wav or .mp3 or .ogg or .mid or .... ? 
> What about a static method on the Audio interface to query content 
> types?

This is now dealt with using fallback support with the <source> element -- 
please let me know if you have a scenario that this would not handle.


> I assume there must be something I can do when the load event fires. 
> What can I do or check in the load Event to ensure that the content type 
> is supported by the user agent?

There are events now that trigger for this.


> 3) I think full URIs should be allowed in the Audio constructor.  Why 
> must the URI be a relative one?  Is this some crude means of preventing 
> leaching of bandwidth?  I feel this is artifically constraining what I 
> should be allowed to do as a developer and as a service provider.  What 
> if Google wants to start an audio ad program for websites?  What if I 
> want to start a web service to let web developers use sounds on my 
> server?

There was and is still no limitation that requires relative URIs. Sorry if 
the text was unclear before; let me know if it is still confusing in this 
respect.


> 4) The term "repeat count" is misleading.The word "repeat" implies a 
> re-occurence, so "to repeat once" means to play a total of two times. 
> Just globally rename "repeat count" to "play count".  This is more 
> accurate of what this number actually is (the number of times the sound 
> will play).

I've changed this around now, let me know if this is still confusing.

Cheers,
-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'



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