Recently JavaScript and CSS is becoming more and more powerful. Like the experiment shown in Chrome Experiment, we can see that the browser is now really capable to handle all those texts, images and animations (at least in the near future, since there is still IE need to catch up). But yes, multimedia means not only these three but also sound and video. As I can see there is no really “standard” way to handle that currently.
It is funny that sound and video can only be presented in a web page with the help of plug-ins. For videos, most of them are served by Flash Player, like YouTube and Vimeo. And very popular among the design agencies and artists, mov files are used, which presented by Quicktime player. Without the plug-ins, no browser can show video. Sound is most likely embed in Flash and actually not many website make use of sounds (I’m not talking about those annoying background music okay?).
I don’t understand why the browsers/web standards seem to be not interested to have native support of sound and video. If they care about those animations, image manipulations, round corners, vector graphics etc., they should support sound and video too.
Actually I have an idea, seems so crazy but it works - making Flash player built into the browser. Maybe not using Adobe’s Flash Player, if anybody mind that is not open source, or Adobe crazily disallow to do so. But there are other open source ones, like Gnash and swfdec, although they may not support all the features but better than nothing.
What do you think?