A word about Copyright

          Many people work much of their lives trying to produce that "perfect" piece of music. Some of which we appreciate to the point where we will buy a CD or cassette recording for our personal enjoyment. This in no way gives us the right to reproduce it on the internet. That is the functional equivalent to broadcasting and it is a priveledge that must be remunerated to the author and artist. We are fortunate at the Compendium of HTML Elements to have the permission of Chris Sansom who composed the jazz that you hear on this and other pages. Do Not use anyone else's work without their express, written permission. Anything less is the equivalent of your working for weeks and getting nothing for it.

A few notes

          There are many publications and internet sites that deal with the various types of sound files and their benefits and weaknesses. This page serves to only demonstrate the various tags and their functions, in comparison to each other.

          The minimum hardware to run this page is a sound card and some sort of speaker/headphone structure.

There are four methods of introducing sound into your page.

          This is one of the nicer methods of introducing sound. It is polite. It allows your reader to select whether or not they wish to listen to your music. Not only that, it is supported by most browsers that support audio file types.

<meta>

          This is how the sound at the beginning of this page was loaded.

<bgsound>

          This is Microsoft Internet Explorer's entry into the fray. It has only two supporting options.

<embed>

          "The embed element defines a container that allows the insertion of arbitrary objects directly into an HTML page. Embedded objects are supported by application-specific plug-ins. EMBED is defined to allow arbitrary attributes." (Sandia)

          Netscape uses this one, supporting it with a bunch of options to make it very useful.

<sound>

          Not to be outdone by the others, Mosaic introduced this one. It shares no support by any other browser that I am aware of.

The Following is quoted from WebTV:

     This is presented, not to endorse WebTV's philosophy but to demonstrate how quickly this author can get into trouble with any given topic. If you need further information on any given audio format, use a search engine to find the appropriate information.

"Sound formats

In version 1.0 of the WebTV HTML interface, sounds can be in General MIDI format. The file types are .mid and .midi.

RealAudio is not supported in the 1.0 version of the WebTV HTML interface. Look for it in version 1.1.

In version 1.1 of the WebTV interface, other sound formats are supported in addition to MIDI:

• All versions of MPEG 1, including Layers I, II, and III. The WebTV interface also supports the Low Sampling Frequency (LSF) versions of MPEG 2, including Layers I, II, and III. The file types are .mp2, .mp3, .m1a, and .mpu.
• The WebTV interface does not support MPEG 2 error correction and multiple track features such as languages and surround sound.
• Shock Wave audio. The file type is .swa.
• Basic Audio from Sun, DEC, and NeXT .au files. The linear 8, linear 16, ulaw, alaw, G723 ADPCM formats are all supported.
• The WebTV interface does not support samples greater than 16 bits or those with proprietary compression formats.
• AIFF Audio. The file types are .aif, .aiff, .aifc, and .afc. The WebTV interface supports the noncompressed format for 8- and 16-bit linear as well as the IMA ADPCM compressed and "none" formats for compressed AIFF files.
• The WebTV interface does not support the ACE or MACE compression formats.
• WAVE Audio from .wav files. The 8- and 16-bit linear, alaw and ulaw, IMA/DVI ADPCM compressed, and Microsoft ADPCM compressed formats are all supported.
• Other proprietary formats are not supported." (WebTV)