Audio Standards HTML5

HTML5 is exciting and anyone who builds web pages is looking forward to implementing these new tags into their sites. HTML5 audio tags are definitely one of the ones on the list meant to make life much easier for both webmasters and end users.

Until now there has never been a standard audio player for browsers. If you wanted to place audio on your site you either had to use one of the available players such as Windows Media Player or Quicktime player. With HTML5 audio there is just simple code to use to place audio anywhere on the page without have to have a separate audio player or 3rd party service hosting your audio.

Here is an example of how to use the HTML5 audio tags in your web code.

<audio src=”song.ogg” controls=”controls”>This is alternate text that is seen if the users browser does not recognize the html5 tag</audio>

There are several attributes you can use along with your tag to customize your player. The attributes include autoplay, control customization, looping and pre-loading. Which means you can start your video when someone opens your page, customize what controls they see on the audio player and even loop the video so it plays continuously over and over.

So with the implementation of this tag it is going to become much easier for the average webmaster to add audio to their websites and blogs. The HTML5 video tag is also new and is similar in that it provides and across the board video player for putting videos on your site.

Right now HTML5 tags especially the audio and video tags are very experimental. Browser support while getting better is still in its infancy stages which means that as cool as these tags are implementing them into your designs now is going to leave a huge part of the PC internet users unable to see the content on your site.

One also has to wonder what the effects of HTML5 audio and video tags on web hosting. Until now most web hosts could depend on the fact that if a blog or small website wanted to use video or audio it was likely they would host it elsewhere.

With the ease of using these tags I have a feeling once they become more of a standard and are more widely used web hosts are going to see far more people hosting big audio and video files on their servers. Which could mean a rise in web hosting costs depending on how much extra storage space and bandwidth is being used.

HTML5 is coming there is no way around it but it is going to take some time before you can safely use it in your websites. Tags like the HTML5 audio tag are going to make certain elements of design so much easier, so until then we will just wait.