This is part two of the HTML5 audio introduction video; if you haven’t watched it already, I recommend checking out part one to get up to speed!

Today, we’ll be working on our HTML5 audio player and adding some exciting functionality to really bring our HTML5 player to life. We’ll be using a method involving data attributes, which allow for easy access to custom values for each audio element, and that’s where our titles, artists and album art come in.

By the end of this tutorial, you’ll understand the following: “Tagging” your audio elements with custom data attributes; such as track title, artist and even album art; using jQuery to manipulate this information and display it on the page, with the flexibility to style it around your own designs.

I’ll also be demonstrating my player example, and talking through how to accomplish certain effects with your data; including displaying the album art as a glossy backdrop to your player.

Have you featured HTML5 audio in a project? How does HTML5 audio compare with older options? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Featured image/thumbnail, sound image via Shutterstock.

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This is part two of the HTML5 audio introduction video; if you haven’t watched it already, I recommend checking out part one to get up to speed!

Today, we’ll be working on our HTML5 audio player and adding some exciting functionality to really bring our HTML5 player to life. We’ll be using a method involving data attributes, which allow for easy access to custom values for each audio element, and that’s where our titles, artists and album art come in.

By the end of this tutorial, you’ll understand the following: “Tagging” your audio elements with custom data attributes; such as track title, artist and even album art; using jQuery to manipulate this information and display it on the page, with the flexibility to style it around your own designs.

I’ll also be demonstrating my player example, and talking through how to accomplish certain effects with your data; including displaying the album art as a glossy backdrop to your player.

Have you featured HTML5 audio in a project? How does HTML5 audio compare with older options? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Featured image/thumbnail, sound image via Shutterstock.

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What gets removed from China’s social networks shows how censorship strategies are advancing, and can even hint at the government’s plans.

In February last year, political scandal rocked China when the fast-rising politician Bo Xilai suddenly demoted his top lieutenant, who then accused his boss of murder, triggering Bo’s political downfall.

Below please find a link to the Student Technical Assistant (Paid College Summer
    Intern) bulletin for DHCD. As you can see, they are recruiting college students in a
    variety of majors/ fields of study in just about every division. 

http://www.jobaps.com/MD/sup/bulpreview.asp?R1=13&R2=999999&R3=234

    
Work that matters. The Maryland Department of Housing & Community Development (DHCD) is a national leader in financing affordable housing and community development lending.  We are good and strive to be great.  
    
The Student Technical Assistant classification is used to hire college students for temporary positions at DHCD. College Transcripts are required to verify coursework completion and current enrollment.
    
LOCATION OF POSITION

    
The majority of positions are located in Crownsville, Maryland. However, some may be located in Baltimore City.
    
Students are responsible for providing their own transportation to and from work.
    
POSITION DUTIES

    
The Student Technical Assistant Classification is used to hire college students for temporary summer positions at DHCD. These positions assist staff in either the Office of the Secretary, Division of Credit Assurance (Asset Management), Community Development Administration (Finance),Division of Finance Administration, Division of Neighborhood Revitalization, Office of Communications and Marketing, Information Technology Division, and the Office of Human Resources.
    
Interns must be able to handle confidential information and work according to agency policies, procedures and guidelines.
    
MINIMUM EDUCATION OR GENERAL REQUIREMENTS

    
Appropriate College Majors: Urban Planning, Public Administration, Public Policy, Architechture, Business Administration, Finance, Accounting, Management, Economics, Journalism, Mass Communications, Advertising, Marketing, Liberal Arts, Media/Technology, Computer Science, Human Resources, or another related field.
    
In order to be eligible for this opportunity, students must have completed freshman, sophomore, junior or senior year in an undergraduate program and be currently enrolled in an undergradute or graduate program.
    

That would be pretty useful, right? Right now it's very common to User Agent "sniff" when you want to make a server-side decision about what to give the client. But UA sniffing has always sucked and sucks more every day. What you really want to know is stuff like "how big is the screen I'm serving to?" or "does the device I'm serving to have touch events?" - that way you can serve resources that are appropriate to those questions. Is there a way to get accurate client side information on the server side?

Why Server Side?

You might want to serve an entirely different layout or different part of a layout if you know (for sure) you are serving to a small mobile device. Or a TV. Or whatever. See this article.

Put the Data in a Cookie

I think the easiest way to make client side information available server side is by putting that data in a cookie. Cookies are sent in the headers of all requests to that domain, so the server has access to them. If that cookie has information in it about how big the browser window is, the server can use it.

Cookie Logic

In order to make the smart choices you want to make, you need this cookie to exist. If it does exist, cool. If it doesn't exist, do the bare minimum you need to do to client test, set the cookie, then refresh.

In PHP, just to illustrate:

<?php if isset(($_COOKIE['_clientInfo'])) { ?>
    
       <p>You have the cookie, so put in your logical stuff here and load the document as you will.</p>
    
    <?php } else { ?>
    
       <p>You don't have the cookie yet, so don't load anything but the resources you need to test the client and set the cookie. Then refresh.</p>
    
    <?php } ?>

Setting the Cookie

What kind of information might you want? Screen size likely. Probably anything that Modernizr would be able to tell you.

It's easy to set a cookie in JavaScript.

document.cookie = "cookieName=" + value;

Make the value easy for you to parse and do what you need with. Here let's make it a string of JSON. We'll make an object with all the data we want and use some jQuery and Modernizr to get the values we want to know.

var clientInfo = {
      browserWidth: $(window).width(),
      browserHeight: $(window).height(),
      flexboxSupport: Modernizr.flexbox,
      SVGSupport: Modernizr.svg
    };
    
    document.cookie = "_clientInfo=" + JSON.stringify(clientInfo);

In testing, I had some issues with Opera so switched to the jQuery cookie plugin and it was fine.

var cookieVal = JSON.stringify(clientInfo);
    
    $.cookie("_clientInfo", cookieVal, {
      expires: 7
    });

Refresh After Setting the Cookie

Now that the cookie is set, you can refresh the page so the document can actually load with all this juicy information available.

window.location.reload();

Jank Alert?

If you don't like the idea of refreshing, you could write it up so you load some kind of default document at the same time you are setting the cookie. No harm there.

How Long Should the Cookie Last?

I dunno. An hour maybe? Forever? There is some chance that you catch somebody when their desktop browser is in an unusual state. Like they have it super small, and they load your page, and they then get a small screen version forever. Or an update to that browser comes out with more advanced features but your old cookie is there. Your call.

Here's an example of one hour:

var now = new Date();
    var time = now.getTime();
    time += 3600 * 1000; // one hour
    now.setTime(time);
    
    document.cookie = "_clientInfo=" + JSON.stringify(clientInfo) + ";expires=" + now.toGMTString();

Using the Info Server Side

Using PHP just as an example, you can easily snag the cookie and access bits of the data we saved as JSON.

<?php
      $json = $_COOKIE['_clientInfo'];
      $obj = json_decode(stripslashes($json));
      echo "<p>Browser Width: " . $obj->{'browserWidth'} . "</p>";
    ?>

You wouldn't just echo it out like above, you'd use some logic on that data and do whatever fancy special serving of resources and content you are going to do.

Using the Info Client Side

The point of this is server-side access, but, you have access to that cookie on the client-side too. This means, theoretically, you wouldn't need to load Modernizr again because you already have that information.

Here's a simple example that gets the data and displays a part of it:

var clientInfo = JSON.parse("<?php echo $_COOKIE['_clientInfo']; ?>");
    var output = "<p>Browser Width: " + clientInfo.browserWidth + "</p>";
    $("#clientInfo").append(output);

Demo

World's simplest demo just to show it's do-able.

Downsides?

I dunno. I suspect there are a bunch otherwise I would think this kind of thing would be done more often. Smart people: chime in in the comments and let me know the ups and downs.

I suspect it might complicate caching. Perhaps that much reading/sending of the cookie is an issue? What about people that don't allow cookies like this? Gotta make sure they don't get in any kind of infinite loop or have the site be unusable.

Other Things

• The first I heard of this kind of thing being used was in Matt Wilcox's Adaptive Images where the screen resolution is saved as a cookie and used to make choices about what kind of images to use.
• Client-Hints is also a thing that aims to give us this information without all this fancy dancing.
• James Pearce's modernizr-server:
  

  The modernizr-server library is a way to bring Modernizr browser data to your server scripting environment.

• Dave Molsen's Detector:
  

  Detector is a simple, PHP- and JavaScript-based browser- and feature-detection library that can adapt to new devices & browsers on its own without the need to pull from a central database of browser information.

• Shane Gliser talks about doing this but saving to HTML5 localstorage in his book Creating Mobile Apps with jQuery Mobile

Make Client Side Data Available Server Side is a post from CSS-Tricks

The UMBC Review is a journal for undergraduate research done at UMBC. CMSC and CMPE majors who have recently finished a research project or paper or plan to do so before the fall should consider submitting it for volume 15, which will be published next April. The Review publishes papers in all disciplines, including the computing sciences.

Papers may be submitted at any time between now and 13 September 2013 for consideration in the next volume. Students graduating this spring or summer are eligible to submit papers on work completed as an undergraduate. See the table of contents of the current issue to get an idea of the range and length of published papers.

If you are interested, fill out this online form to get additional information.