Now Hear This!

With all the talk about Flash versus HTML5 you might be forgiven for thinking that HTML5 is just about video. It’s not, of course. HTML5 is a major extension of HTML in many areas including media.

Today, I’d like to explore HTML5 audio, which is similar to HTML5 video in many respects, but fundamentally different in others. For starters, a video element is essentially just a TV set embedded in a webpage whereas audio can serve multiple purposes – four examples:

• Sound effects. A button can make a sound when it’s clicked. How about a swoosh sound when a division is toggled open or closed?
• Alerts and notifications. A little bell can sound when an AJAX request completes and updates a page section. Or, an audio “Uh Oh!” can play when you enter a malformed email address into a input field.
• Background sounds. Some web pages can benefit from background music. But say you have a photo gallery of birds. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to click one and hear it tweet?
• Spoken content. Yes, we have podcasts, but we also need something simpler such as pronunciations of foreign words and phrases, or a click-to-have-this-post-read-to-you feature so you can go off and browse other webpages while I continue to read this one to you.

S i l e n c e.

Yo Dawg, I can’t hear your website!

This isn’t as dumb a statement as it first, um, sounds. Web developers have shied away from including sound in webpages because of several difficulties:

• Confusion – There are codecs and there are file formats. A codec is a method of encoding audio data. A file format is a container for the codec and optional metadata, such as a song title. Some file formats can accommodate multiple codecs; other formats are codec specific. For simplicity, we can narrow this discussion to the most popular file formats/codecs for the Web. These are:
  • wav – An uncompressed format. A wav file with 30 seconds of silence is the same size (megabytes) as a file with 30 seconds of symphonic music.
  • mp3 – A popular format for music that uses a lossy compression format resulting in file sizes typically 1/10 the size of a wav file with the same audio content.
  • ogg – An open-source alternative to mp3 that also uses a lossy compression format.
• Cross-browser incompatibility – Unlike images, where all major browsers support the three major file types—gif, jpg and png—all browsers do not support all audio formats. For instance: mp3 is a proprietary format and its decoding software cannot be included in GPL-licensed, open-source applications such as the Mozilla Foundation’s Firefox browser. Here’s a table showing which formats are supported by the current versions of the major web browsers:
  

  	IE	Firefox	Safari	Chrome	Opera
  wav	NO	YES	YES	NO	NO
  mp3	NO*	NO	YES	YES	YES
  ogg	NO	YES	NO	YES	NO

  (* IE8 does not recognize the audio element at all. The IE9 beta works only with mp3 files. )

• Plugin required – HTML4 Browsers do not support audio natively. A plugin is required and JavaScript must be enabled. While most browsers support audio with a distributed default plugin, web developers must still use the ugly and opaque object, embed and param elements to bring sounds to a webpage.
• Insufficient processing power – For the first time visitor to a page, it can take several seconds for an older or overloaded browser to load the player code, download, decode and play a audio file. This pretty much nixes using sound for mouseover effects, even simple click sounds for navigation buttons.

YouTube made Web video workable. No such service existed to popularize the use of audio in webpages. On the contrary, Napster.com and iTunes focused attention on downloadable music applications. Wouldn’t it be great if there was an easy way to incorporate sounds on a webpage for other purposes. Good News! There is. All major browsers now support basic HTML5 audio with the notable exception of Internet Explorer.

The HTML5 Audio Solution

HTML5 audio consists of the audio element and a JavaScript API for playing the sound it represents. The element is a container (it has both opening and closing tags) and what’s inside is fallback content for legacy browsers and search-bots. It can be written simply as:

<audio src="url" autoplay loop>
        Aw, snap. Your browser doesn't support HTML5 audio!
</audio>

The above would be perfect for playing background music on a webpage. it could be placed anywhere in the body of the document—heard but not seen. For creating a controllable audio player, the controls attribute can be added to the opening tag.

<audio src="url" controls>
        <a href="url">Download the audio file</a>
</audio>

Which, depending on your browser will create a player like one of these:*

IE	Download the audio file
Firefox
Safari
Chrome
Opera

(* Just pictures of the controls in different browsers. They don’t work here; neither does the link.)

Unfortunately, because of the differing support among browsers for the three file types, this approach won’t work in all browsers. That means having at least mp3 and ogg audio file versions and using browser detection to figure out which to load.

But wait. There’s an alternate form of the audio element that takes a different approach: try one format and, if it doesn’t work, try another. You still need at least two files but the syntax is much simpler.

<audio id="bgSound" loop>
        <source src="audio/bgSound.mp3" type="audio/mp3" />
        <source src="audio/bgSound.ogg" type="audio/ogg" />
        <-- lnsert fallback Flash Player code here --">
</audio>

The audio element must be in the body of the html document. I’ve given an id attribute to the above so it can be referred to by JavaScript statements. Place a script element right after the audio element to get its DOM object:

<script type="text/javascript">
  var bgSound = document.getElementById('bgSound');
</script>

Don’t put the JavaScript in the head of the document, the audio element must be defined before its DOM object can be referenced. The DOM object for the audio allows you to change its properties, start and stop the music. To play the audio as page background, add an onload attribute to the body tag:

<body onload="bgSound.play();">

As an alternative, use jQuery in the document head to call the play method at document ready time (when all the HTML is parsed but images may still be loading.)

<script type="text/javascript">
  $(document).ready( function () {$('#bgSound').play();} );
</script>

The jQuery $ function is similar to JavaScript’s getElementById( ) method. You’ll need the jQuery library for this to work. If it isn’t already loaded, placing the following script element in the document head will get it from Google.

<script type="text/javascript"
 src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3/jquery.min.js">
</script>

To play a sound effect when the user’s mouse is over a link, remove the loop attribute from the audio tag and add preload, then use the onmouseover attribute in the link. You can get the DOM object and play it in one move:

<audio id="thanks" preload>
        <source src="audio/thanks.mp3" type="audio/mpeg" />
        <source src="audio/thanks.ogg" type="audio/ogg" />
</audio> 

<a href="javascript:void(0);"
   onmouseover="document.getElementById('thanks').play();">A shout out</a>

Or, to assign a sound to a button like the one at the bottom of this post

<audio id="ella" preload>
        <source src="audio/swonderful.mp3" type="audio/mpeg" />
        <source src="audio/swonderful.ogg" type="audio/ogg" />
</audio>

<button onclick="document.getElementById('ella').play()">
        I like it!
</button>

The JavaScript API for HTML5 Media elements contains many more properties and features including a track property which can be used to segment a file into separate sounds of different durations. One audio element could be used to (pre)load dozens of different sound effects for a website. Not all advanced API features will be supported by all browsers in the near future, but eventually, using sound on a website will become as natural and as easy to do as using images.

A shout out to my friends at WWWAC who helped test HTML5 Audio on the IE9 beta release.

What do you think of HTML Audio?    I like it!

Let’s say you have a page on your website and you would like to offer your readers the ability to jot down notes related to the content of that page in some kind of input field. Furthermore, since you expect visitors to revisit the page from time to time, you’d like to store their notes somewhere so that the input field can be loaded when they next load the page. Before HTML5, you would either use a server-side process, cookies or some combination of the two to make this happen. With HTML5, there’s a third choice: the localStorage window object.

First, let’s start with the input field. We could use a textarea element but in HTML5, any element can be turned into an input element by adding the contenteditable attribute:

<ul id="notepad" contenteditable="true">
  <li></li>
</ul>

In the  CSS for this list element, we want to set its size and position:

#notepad {
 height: 20%;
 width: 20%;
 display: none;
 position: fixed;
 top: 0.5in; right: 0.5in;
 overflow: auto;
 padding: 1em;
 border: thin solid;
 list-style-type: none;
 background-color: #fffff0; /* light yellow */
}

This will place the list element 1/2 inch down and in from the top-right corner of the browser’s window. The bordered box will take up 1/5 of the window’s width and height and scrolling will be enabled if there is more content then fits. The display property is set to “none” initially. The user will be able to make the notepad list visible by clicking a button with an onclick handler.

<button id="notepad_toggle"
        onclick="$('#notepad').toggle()">Notepad</button>

I’m using jQuery for the onclick handler because it makes it easy to target elements . If you copy this code, make sure you load jQuery somewhere in the document’s head.

HTML5 extends the window object with the localStorage property and two primary methods: setItem(name, value) and getItem(name) to set and retrieve name/value pairs of data items. Any number of such items can be stored with a webpage and each page’s storage object is independent of any other page’s. Unlike cookies, local storage items are never sent by the browser to the server and thus provides a efficient means of saving page state information even for megabyte data items.

For our example, we can store the contents of the notepad element each time it is changed. We will do this with the blur method, detecting when the user leaves the notepad to do something else. Here’s some jQuery that does that nicely:

$('#notepad').blur(function () {
  localStorage.setItem('notepad', this.innerHTML);
});

How nice is that? The storage doesn’t have to be initialized; it’s just there waiting for you to throw something into it.

When the page is first loaded we need to check if the notepad contents has been saved from some previous visit by this browser and if so, use the stored value to replace the inner contents of the list. This can be done with the following JavaScript statement:

  if ( localStorage.getItem('notepad') ) {
    var notepad = document.getElementById('notepad');
    notepad.innerHTML = localStorage.getItem('notepad');
  }

Note that there’s no conflict in the three uses of ‘notepad’ in the code above. The name for the local variable can be anything as can the name of the stored data item. Neither has to be the same as the UL element’s ID. Hopefully, I’m avoiding confusion by naming everything ‘notepad’ and not adding any.

Since this is only going to work on some browsers, let’s test to see if local storage is available. If it isn’t,  we can just hide the the button that makes the notepad visible.

if (!window.localStorage) $('#notepad_toggle').hide();

or, for debugging, we can call an alert message.

All of the code can go into a script element embedded in the content body, like this blog post, for example:

Notepad

Click the button above and enter anything in the light yellow notepad that opens in the top right corner of your HTML5 capable browser. Enter anything you want – I’ll never see it, nor will anyone else. What’s entered in your local storage stays in your local storage. Try dragging and dropping images, tables, links and other thingys. Notice something interesting? You can’t use HTML to markup your own typing but anything you drag or paste in retains all of its HTML formatting. Now Go Away! Come back to this page sometime later (with the same browser) and click the notepad button again. There’s your stuff!

Click here to see the code for a stand-alone demo to get you started.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<title>Notepad Demo</title>
<!-- (c) 2010 by Larry Aronson -->
<style>
    body  { padding: 36px; }
    #notepad {
     height: 20%;
     width: 20%;
     display: none;
     position: fixed;
     top: 0.5in; right: 0.5in;
     overflow: auto;
     padding: 1em;
     border: thin solid;
     list-style-type: none;
     background-color: #fffff0; /* light yellow */
    }
</style>

<!-- let's get our jQuery from Google -->
<script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4/jquery.min.js">
</script>
<script>
    $(document).ready(function () {
      if ( window.localStorage ) { 	// see if webstorage is working
        if ( localStorage.getItem('notepad') ) {
          var notepad = document.getElementById('notepad');
          notepad.innerHTML = localStorage.getItem('notepad');
        }
        $('#notepad').blur(function () {	// save when exiting the notepad
          localStorage.setItem('notepad', this.innerHTML);
        });
      }
      else {
        $('#notepad_toggle').hide(); 	// hide button if no webstorage
      }
    });
</script>
</head>  

<body>
  <button id="notepad_toggle"
  	  onclick="$('#notepad').toggle('slow')">Notepad</button>
<ul id="notepad" contenteditable="true">
<li> </li>
</ul>

</body>
</html>

My client, Kate Nasser – the people skills coach, has grown her consulting business by consistently adding content to her blog/website and by using Twitter, LinkedIn and youTube to draw traffic. A recent SEO/SEM assessment of her site recommended adding more keyword-rich content and reducing some of front page’s  clutter.  This is what the page looked liked.

Advanced Tooltips.

We had a box on the right side of the content area listing a dozen “Needs” linked to different site pages or posts. With each need there was an associated comment (technically, a definition list.) We decided to move the box to the left side of the page (ahead of the straight text content,) placing the comment parts in tooltip boxes that appear as you mouse over the topic part. Kate was free to add more content to the hidden (only from humans) comment parts.

Tooltips are the little yellow boxes that appear when your mouse hovers over a link. The content of the tooltip box is taken from the title attribute of the HTML tag that creates the link. But ordinary tooltips are boring with fixed style and color; yellow wasn’t the best choice given the site’s aqua tones.

So, I installed JQuery Tools from Flowplayer.org which has an easy to use, advanced tooltip tool. JQuery is a library of Javascript functions that make it easy to add dynamic behavior to Web page elements without having to worry about cross-browser incompatibilities. JQuery Tools is a free, lightweight tool collection that provides basic behaviors to attach to any page element. The Advanced Tooltip tool replaces the browser’s builtin tooltip and can be attached to any page element, not just links.

To make Advanced Tooltips work, you have to provide a page element with a unique id to hold the content. It doesn’t matter where it’s placed. The element, typically a division, is dynamically positioned near the moused-over element. The element is re-useable; you only need one holder element for all tooltips of a given style on a page. The tooltip is styled using Normal CSS so I was able to match the colors and typography of that section of the site’s front page.

Technical Details (Expand)

<script src="http://cdn.jquerytools.org/1.1.2/jquery.tools.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
<?php if (is_page("2")) { ?>
    $(document).ready(function() {
        $("h3.need-title a").tooltip({ tip: "#TipBox",
                                       offset: [-25, 150],
                                       effect: 'fade' });
    });
<?php } ?>
</script>

<div id="TipBox" class="needs-tips">&nbsp;</div>

#TipBox {
 display:none;
 width: 200px;
}

.needs-tips {
 text-align: left;
 background-color: #fafcfb;
 border: 2px solid #009ea0;
 font: italic 10pt comic sans ms;
 color: #000;
 padding: 3px 8px;
}

Random Quotes

Kate has a bunch of her own quotes and was updating her front page every few days with a new quote from the collection. She asked if there were some way to automate the process. I browsed the various code and plugin collections and found noting simple or suitable. I decided to write my own.

I copied her front page as a new draft page and cloned the default page template and assigned it to the new page. Thus, I was able to work on and test the new features without endangering the site’s current front page. The cloned template would contain custom code to randomly pick a quote and place it at the beginning of the content area. The quotes themselves would be stored (and editable) as custom fields for that page with the key, “quote”.

<?php
    $todaysquote = '';
    $quotes = get_post_meta('2', 'quote');
    if (!empty($quotes)) {
        $todaysquote = $quotes[rand(0, sizeof($quotes) - 1)];
    }
?>
<div class="dailyquote">&ldquo;<?php _e($todaysquote); ?>&rdquo;
<span>&mdash;Kate Nasser</span></div>

First, a PHP variable, $todaysquote, is initialized. Then the WordPress function, get_post_meta(), gets all custom fields from post number 2 (that’s the front page) with key = ‘quote’. The values are returned as an array of strings and assigned to the variable, $quotes. If it’s not empty, the built-in, PHP random number generator picks one of its array items. Finally, the last two lines define the HTML division element that will hold the quote,  enclosing it in smart quote marks and adding Kate’s signature. Note the use of the special echo function,  _e($todaysquote),  to encode any HTML characters that might be in the quote string.

One of the upsides of this technique is that a new front page is seen in most every visit to the front page including those by search engine robots. Over time, this can expand the number of keywords associated with the page. Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to measure which quotes work best. If you do add random content like this to a page, you should check to see if you have a caching plug-in active. You might want to exclude that page from the cache.

I added this feature as a template hack because my client only wanted it on one page which already had a customized template. It could be easily generalized and added as a filter to the theme’s functions file, for example, to append a random quote to post content when generating a single-post view.