Re: inline sounds
Rich Wiggins <WIGGINS@msu.edu>
Message-id: <9312071845.AA22629@dxmint.cern.ch>
Date: Tue, 07 Dec 93 13:28:46 EST
From: Rich Wiggins <WIGGINS@msu.edu>
Subject: Re: inline sounds
To: bryan oakley <ctrbdo%iapa.uucp@constellation.ecn.uoknor.edu>,
www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
In-reply-to: Your message of Tue, 7 Dec 93 08:04:32 CST
Content-Length: 1593
>I guess if I had to vote (and why not, this is my posting, eh?) I
>would play the sound on-the-fly as the surrounding text is being
>rendered for the screen, AND place a little sound icon where the tag
>is in the text so that the user can replay at will. The rule would be
>that whenever the icon has to be rendered for display it would be
>played as well (unless deferred playing is turned on)
This may not be such a good idea. You might want to have a bunch
of "inline" sounds throughout a document. For instance, a
colleague once commented on an article I'd written via Nextmail,
which presents a lip icon showing each inline sound. The icon
is precisely adjacent to the passage where it was placed by
the author. This is important, so that the sounds match up
with the text they are associated with. Yes, the reader/listener
must click to hear each sound, but this is not onerous.
If you did it any other way, the timing of the playing of a sound
would be subject to vagaries such as how large your window is and
how fast your workstation renders the intervening text and images.
You'd effectively be limited to one inline sound per page.
In a somewhat different context I suggested it'd be nice to have
the ability to deliver an HTML-marked up storyboard, implying
the need to include pauses between relevant sections, but the
response was that should be driven by a workstation-resident script.
You either need to have the user invoke the playing of the next
sound, or you need a guranteed minimum timeout between selections.
/Rich Wiggins, CWIS Coordinator, Michigan State U