I had this monstrously long 'design' document on the 'how I want the
thing to behave' and on re-reading it decided 'nobody is going to
want to read that much less help if I throw a whole novel at the
wall.'

instead.

Y'know how Youtube is going to war with third party clients and the
removal of the dislike button, and how normal people have been
crowded out? It is beyond means for the community to make a full on
video site, but what about making something more along the lines of
web 1.0?

YTMND of Yore, before it went to flash, was literally 'here is a gif
and an audio file hit back when you're done.'

I've tried hand making one of those just to see what the end-state
is, so I'd know what I have to try building, and it doesn't matter
what I do. I can't get the audio to play. It'll play if I fiddle
with code already on page, but then I'll make that change, and it
still won't play when I refresh the site.

https://ctrl-c.club/~singletona082/ytmnd/index.html

Step One:
What did I do wrong?

Step Two:
Let's worry about Step One first, but Step Two is asking if there is
any actual interest before I start flooding the group with word
salad.

Step Three:
???

Step Four:
There is no Profit. Only Memes.

--- Synchronet 3.19b-Linux NewsLink 1.113

On Fri, 16 Aug 2024, Andrew Singleton wrote:

I can't get the audio to play. It'll play if I fiddle
with code already on page, but then I'll make that change, and it
still won't play when I refresh the site.

https://ctrl-c.club/~singletona082/ytmnd/index.html

Step One:
What did I do wrong?

I'm actually not sure what caused it to actually play _intermittently_
in your setup (a behavior I'd expect is it should consistenly *not* play);
but anyway...

From <https://ctrl-c.club/~singletona082/ytmnd/conanstare/conanstare.html>:

<embed
src="https://ctrl-c.club/~singletona082/ytmnd/conanstare/moonlight.mp3"
autostart="true" loop="true">
</embed>

The thing is, you are using traditional Netscape-style `<embed>` tag,
which some (I guess many) browsers today would (save for few exceptions [1]) treat it as a plug-in invocation; even when the broswer itself is able to
play the media file in question when user put the URL of that file
into the location bar. I personally think this is silly, but that is the behavior I observed since the early days of HTML 5.0; at least in Firefox (+derivatives) and Opera Classic.

When I opened that page in my browser (Pale Moon), it simply shown
a small black box, with lego icon and the following message inside:

A plugin is needed to display this content.

Granted, my Pale Moon version can't play MP3 audio. But when I modified
that code to point it to an on-disk Ogg Vorbis file --which it *is* capable
of playing-- it ended up showing the same box anyway.

To fix this, I would recommend you to use HTML 5.0 way of audio embedding [2] as a primary mean for playback; and relegate your traditional `<embed>`
into a fallback for retro setup (which sometimes actually have a real [3]
media player ActiveX/NPAPI plugin for this use).

The code fixed code is as follows:

<audio src="moonlight.mp3" controls autoplay loop>
<embed src="moonlight.mp3" autostart="true" loop="true">
</audio>

Notes:

- I also took a liberty to change your use of absolute URL
to relative URLs, for ease of your further maintenance.
- I don't think Netscape version of `<embed>` actually support such
`autostart` and `loop` attribute; but HTML 5.0 doesn't forbid them--
such parameter would be passed to the plug-in in question. [4]
- `<embed>`, like `<img>`, doesn't have an end tag;
try not to confuse this with HTML 4.01-standarized `<object>` tag.

This should take care of your audio problem, at least for browsers
which could play MP3 file in HTML 5.0 way.

Regards,
~xwindows


P.S. When I say "HTML 5.0", I explicitly mean W3C HTML 5 original edition
(October 2014) <https://www.w3.org/TR/2014/REC-html5-20141028/>.
For what other people refer to as "HTML5" or "HTML/LS" nowadays,
I would refer to that as "HTML/MovingGoalpost".

-----

[1] Image files (including SVG) are among these exceptions.
[2] https://www.w3.org/TR/2014/REC-html5-20141028/embedded-content-0.html#the-audio-element
[3] Not necessarily a RealPlayer. (*Ba-tum-tss*)
[4] http://blooberry.com/indexdot/html/tagpages/e/embed.htm
https://www.w3.org/TR/2014/REC-html5-20141028/embedded-content-0.html#the-embed-element
--
xwindows' gallery of freely-licensed artworks
https://tilde.club/~xwindows/ http://tilde.club/~xwindows/ gopher://tilde.club/1/~xwindows/
--- Synchronet 3.19b-Linux NewsLink 1.113

Thank you. I'd... also figured out the issue on my end being by default
Firefox goes 'no audio does not automatically start.'

Which I suppose puts a damper on things...

This whole time I was faffing around up to and including 'make the url
absolute to avoid ANY chance of it messing up' and 'well hey the
browser doesn't like autoplay. Ya Goof.'

On Mon, 19 Aug 2024 19:30:05 +0700 (+07)
xwindows <xwindows@tilde.club> wrote:

Notes:

- I also took a liberty to change your use of absolute URL
to relative URLs, for ease of your further maintenance.
- I don't think Netscape version of `<embed>` actually support such
`autostart` and `loop` attribute; but HTML 5.0 doesn't forbid them--
such parameter would be passed to the plug-in in question. [4]
- `<embed>`, like `<img>`, doesn't have an end tag;
try not to confuse this with HTML 4.01-standarized `<object>` tag.

This should take care of your audio problem, at least for browsers
which could play MP3 file in HTML 5.0 way.

Regards,
~xwindows

P.S. When I say "HTML 5.0", I explicitly mean W3C HTML 5 original
edition (October 2014)
<https://www.w3.org/TR/2014/REC-html5-20141028/>. For what other
people refer to as "HTML5" or "HTML/LS" nowadays, I would refer to
that as "HTML/MovingGoalpost".

-----

[1] Image files (including SVG) are among these exceptions.
[2] https://www.w3.org/TR/2014/REC-html5-20141028/embedded-content-0.html#the-audio-element
[3] Not necessarily a RealPlayer. (*Ba-tum-tss*) [4] http://blooberry.com/indexdot/html/tagpages/e/embed.htm https://www.w3.org/TR/2014/REC-html5-20141028/embedded-content-0.html#the-embed-element

--- Synchronet 3.19b-Linux NewsLink 1.113

Andrew Singleton <singletona082@ctrl-c.club> wrote:

YTMND of Yore, before it went to flash, was literally 'here is a gif
and an audio file hit back when you're done.'

I had dial-up internet in late 1990s, but complety missed this YTMND
thing. Any graphical browser can display still images and animated
GIFs, and all mainstream browsers will offer to play a sound file when
the user clicks on a link to it instead of (or in addition to)
downloading it to the HDD. Is it not enough?

I've tried hand making one of those just to see what the end-state
is, so I'd know what I have to try building, and it doesn't matter
what I do. I can't get the audio to play. It'll play if I fiddle
with code already on page, but then I'll make that change, and it
still won't play when I refresh the site.

https://ctrl-c.club/~singletona082/ytmnd/index.html

I cannot resist a completely off-topic comment on your website: although intended to be in the style of late 90s, it is too wide for my
1600x1200, 20" monitor -- NEC MultiSync 2090UXi, whereas in late 90s I
had either a 14" CRT, or a 15" 1024x768 LCD, which would not stand a
ghost of a chance with your website. My advice is to amend the
CSS to allow the site to adapt to the available width, with perhaps an
upper limit to prevent incoveniently long lines, e.g. set body with as:

@media( min-width: 60ch ) {
body{ width: 60ch; } }
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