With the exception of low-quality animated GIFs and the proprietary <bgsound> tag, HTML’s native multimedia support has been limited to static images. Nearly all of the audio and video on the web has been handled by plug-ins, typically Flash or QuickTime, until now. HTML5 introduces the <audio> and <video> elements, bringing rich declarative sound and motion to our otherwise static text and graphics.

Audio and Video Basics

In their simplest forms, both new tags work like the trusty <img> tag, with a src attribute for the URL of the audio or video file respectively — except that both new tags have end tags as ...

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