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EMBEDDED VS. ON DEMAND AUDIO
In this article we make the differentiation between embedded audio and audio on demand. The web is a wonderful library of information, and the availability of music, speeches, and other audio, as well as video files that can be played back when you want them in their own "player" window (such as the RealPlayer or the Windows Media Player) is a wonderful thing. We however, are more interested in audio becoming an integrated part of a site.
The term embedding in a general sense means the integration of a media source so that it plays back within the main browser window, in the case of audio it plays back invisibly.
Embedding audio or video leaves little room for the developer of the player codec to advertise itself, or to have screen space to sell to other advertisers. As the web has evolved little effort has been put into robust and cross platform methods to embed audio. There are ways of using java script to control plug-ins, but these solutions seem to work in a limited number of browsers and rarely if at all on Macintoshes. It is our belief that cross-platform compatibility is a necessity, 5-10% is a large number of people! Call it affirmative action on our part, but we believe that a limitation in functionality is preferable to an exclusion of millions of people and that it is not in the interest of the developers or the public. There are applications where limited browsers and Windows-only compatibility is useful, such as some in-house corporate training.
By limiting functionality we mean being unable in many cases to pause the audio and continue it, and to initiate playback from simple java script commands.
As more and more web developers use audio in an embedded fashion, we hope that the infrastructure matures to allow us to do this with full functionality and without the need to invent workarounds, such as hidden frames to embed audio in.
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