so i read all four of the posts on this page of this forum alone on how to play sound files on web pages. someone, probably you, knows the definitive way to do this with the OBJECT element, not EMBED (it's gotta validate, afterall.) Let's say you want the viewer of the web page to be able to control whether the song plays or not, be able to adjust the volume, you want the song to loop, and you want your page to validate... what's the code you need to do this. (the page i'm applying this to is HTML 4.01 trans, but i'd like it to work in newer XHTML pages i'm learning. anyone? and for everyone who posted so far on this issue, thanks!

To be honest, if you've got a page that works for all the major browsers then validating isn't that big of an issue. I'm not saying that it's not important to try to use the standards, but it's also not the end-all-be-all. It may be that at the moment the best all purpose way to embed sound (assuming that you SHOULD embed sound) is still with the EMBED tag. That said, check out this page. Gives some examples on the OBJECT tag. The problem is that it starts introducing OS-dependant and proprietary stuff. Users of WMP 10 (such as myself) have problems with his simple OBJECT example where IE first asks a question about ActiveX controls, then opens a full copy of WMP to play the "embeded" file.

Thanq, Dr. for the ref to the article... very informative. My take, give the viewer the option to play a sound or two if they want to.