Tips & Tricks
Advanced Topics
Adding Sound To Your Page

A web page can only handle so many embedded sound files. The previous page used the EMBED tag to play the back ground sound. This page is using the OBJECT tag.

The Object tag is very much like the previous two tags, but can be more widely used for all types of embedded objects. The tag looks like this:

<OBJECT DATA="../img/vivsprng.mid" HEIGHT="60" WIDTH="145">
<PARAM NAME="autostart" VALUE="true">
<PARAM NAME="loop" VALUE="true">
</OBJECT>

Like the other tags, this one utilizes a start <object> and end section </object>. The only parameters within the Object tag itself needed for background sound are:

• The DATA tag, which tells the browser where to find the sound file you want to play.
• The Height and Width of the player image.

In order to add functionality to the Object tag, you need to include the PARAM tag. This tag allows you to specify other HTML tag parameters to apply to the Object tag. This makes the Object tag a very powerful tool, but it also adds to the complexity of the tag's code.

In this case, I've added two parameters normally associated with the EMBED tag.

Although these additional parameters set my preferences for the background sound, it also provides a visitor to this page with a little of their own control. The buttons on the player image are functional. So you can stop or pause the music. The bar beneath the buttons is a sound control. You can increase or decrease the volume of the sound if desired.

Now one additional problem I had with this tag is getting it to work within a table format. I've tried several options and settings, to place this code inside a data cell. But each time I tried to reload the page in Netscape and Microsoft's Explorer, the browsers would crash.

As I mentioned on the previous page, this tag is not fully supported as yet. But as technology moves forward, so will support and functionality for web browsers.

Return to the previous Sound page, or continue to the Next section: Using Programs & Javascripts

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