Before launching our journey to embedding media with HTML5, let's step back for just a moment to survey the terrain. Until HTML5, if you wanted to listen to audio or watch video from a website, you had to do so through the agency of a browser plugin of one kind or another. That plugin might have been QuickTime Player (typically on a Mac), Windows Media Player (typically on a Windows computer), Flash, a plugin supplied by your hardware manufacturer, or some other program.
Since users listened to audio with the aid of plugins (such as Windows Media Player or QuickTime Player), web designers had almost no control over what appeared onscreen when a user listened to an audio. HTML5 provides what is called native audio (as well as native video). Native video does not require a plugin. The player and controls still vary some depending on the browsing environment, but with HTML5, the audio player is relatively standardized.
There are two compatibility issues in presenting...