[sword-devel] Linked in audio files

[Karl Kleinpaste]

Chris Little <chrislit at crosswire.org> writes:
> If you mean to embed the audio in-line, I would recommend using the
> <figure> element. There's nothing specifically image-oriented about the
> element, aside from implications made by its name.

Yes, there is: The XXXhtmlhref filters wrap the resulting HTML <img>
element in <a href="passagestudy.jsp?action=showImage..."> for the sake
of letting the application kick off a standard external viewer, if it
knows how to do so.

Sure, we could expect applications to extend the semantic of "showImage"
to include playing audio files, fine.  Then we are left with how to
display a clickable element (or some similar mechanism) for the user to
be made aware that he's got an audio clip he could play, because
otherwise there's no visible content wrapped by the showImage href.  So
the application probably has to hack the filter output to spackle in a
standard miniature image to indicate it, to go along with the intended
<img> pseudo-picture actually-audio reference, and then understand how
to distinguish file types being kicked with an image viewer versus being
kicked with an audio player.

I think this overloads img/figure quite a lot, to no good benefit in the
long run.  Better would be tags that indicate audio natively, rather
than to coerce image support, and have the filters do the right thing by
producing a visible "you can click here to hear audio" marker.

No matter how one looks at it, there is a fair amount of work to be done
to support such a thing.