By Tom Mulhern
The Internet, or more specifically the World Wide Web, has evolved so quickly and has caught on so broadly that you can’t help but look at its growth in awe. People have even taken to calling short timespans "Internet Years," and we now practically expect our information before we click our mouse. Blink, and you risk missing a lot. Only five years ago, when the first graphical browsers (Mosaic, and then Netscape Navigator 1.x) appeared, those who had computers went "ooh" and "aah" over them. After all, you could visit distant places and see colorful things–although there wasn’t yet very much on the web. Back then, browsers were, by today’s standards, quite simple. Site designers had little control over the look of a page, and sound was barely supported.
Fast-forward to today, and almost everyone you know has Internet access, an email account, and a good idea of what’s out there on the WWW. And expectations have clearly risen. But the integration of audio into the online experience is still lagging. Virtually nothing to do with audio is directly supported in the browser–it’s all pretty much up to the user to find and load plug-ins, pieces of software that enable playing audio via the browser. Want to hear an MP3 file? First you need to install the appropriate plug-in. Want to hear some Liquid Audio? Beatnik, perhaps? Same deal. Even if you want to hear WAV, AIFF, or AU audio files, it means that the browser has to spawn an extra playback window. (And these three formats don’t stream like Real or MP3.)
Yeah, I’m plenty disappointed, and you should be, too. After a late start and years of playing catch-up to Netscape, Microsoft Internet Explorer has now zoomed to its 5.x generation, and the Mozilla group (http://www.mozilla.org) is valiantly fighting the open-source battle to drive Netscape Communicator from 4.7 up to 5.0. Newcomer browsers such as Opera are barely developed, so it’s hard to count them as being among the major forces. But despite rapid evolution of many features within the browsers, audio is still taking a backseat to interconnectivity between browsers and programs such as spreadsheets and calendars. In the meantime, many people keep calling what’s on the web "multimedia," even though it’s still pretty much a static visual medium operating in silence. Watch your TV with the sound turned off, and tell me how rich a multimedia experience that is. It’s pathetically similar to today’s web. Audio should be as much a part of the online experience as graphics and text, plain and simple.
So, who do you complain to? Sadly, no one. The WorldWideWeb Consortium (W3C, for short; http://www.w3.org) has working groups that hammer out standards. They work with people who come from all parts of the globe and from many companies, including Microsoft, AOL/Netscape, etc. It’s hard to please everyone, yet the W3C does an admirable job of putting together recommendations and developing standards for such things as HTML (the code that tells a web page how to look) and web accessibility. But just because something becomes a standard doesn’t mean that it’s adhered to. And sometimes things are too political or cumbersome to be resolved and formalized as standards (think "gun control" and you have a topic that would parallel some of the issues that the W3C might be asked to deal with). However, there’s no enforcement behind the W3C’s standards, and there’s no mandate by Microsoft, AOL/Netscape, or anyone else to actually follow them. Adherence is voluntary. Internet Explorer and Communicator both follow many of the W3C’s recommendations, but not all. And in a multitude of cases, what one adheres to, the other doesn’t. If they can’t follow standards for the way text appears on a web page, how do you expect them to integrate audio or video the same way?
What do you do, then? Well, if you’re smart, you create a software plug-in that works with the existing browsers, at least solving the problem for yourself. If you release it to the world and it catches on, it can become a de facto standard, one that many people use daily, like MP3. Another example is QuickTime, and yet another is Microsoft’s Media Player. But you can see where this is leading: Many different standards, which drives audio (and video) developers–and musicians and recording professionals–nuts. If you want to put your songs out on the web, you have to decide which format, or formats, to put it in. But why in the heck aren’t the people who design the browsers taking the lead in this, or at least looking at a standard, and integrating it? Why should anyone have to develop or use plug-ins for something as essential, as basic, as sound? Even the people inventing TV in the 1930s understood the appeal of integrating images and sound in a single medium. They did not envision people staring at one box with moving pictures while listening to another box for audio, or installing after-market circuitry to get sound.
There’s a good reason for some standards, such as light bulbs that screw in clockwise, traffic lights having red lights to indicate "stop," or 110 volts of AC electricity coming out of the outlets in our homes and offices. Adhering to standards saves costs, annoyance, and in some cases, injury. Adhering to standards simply makes sense.
But for the Internet, there first has to be a standard for audio, such as MP3, incorporated into the browsers themselves. Then we can get on with the business of presenting our music and other audio in a single format, rather than either putting it in multiple formats or sticking with one format and hoping to hit the majority of users on the Internet. One way takes up more of our time after we’ve done the actual recording, while the other saves us time while losing listeners.
I’m not sure what the browser makers are waiting for. They can make bold move and add one kind of audio support into their browsers without precluding the possibility of using plug-ins. Innovation wouldn’t grind to a halt, but at least there would be standard, a least common denominator. Then anyone who wished to integrate sound into their web pages could choose which hoop, or hoops, to jump through–if, indeed, they want to jump through hoops at all.