The television interface to the Internet provides broad creative opportunities for web development. Sound and animation contribute a great deal to the creation of a more "television-like" experience for the user.

The latest version of WebTV supports a wide spectrum of sound and animation, including: wav, aiff, au, MOD, MIDI and GSM, RealAudio 3.0, and MacroMedia’s Flash 1.0. (In coming months, Flash 2.0 will be supported by both WebTV Classic and WebTV Plus.).

A WebTV specific tag, <AUDIOSCOPE>, enables a graphical display of the amplitude of sound. This animated, visual image of sounds played can be customized using attributes such as ALIGN, BORDER, GAIN, HEIGHT, LEFTCOLOR, LEFTOFFSET, MAXLEVEL, RIGHTCOLOR, RIGHTOFFSET, WIDTH. This is not a container element; so use the start tag but not the end tag

ALIGN

can be ABSBOTTOM, ABSMIDDLE, BASELINE, BOTTOM, LEFT, MIDDLE, RIGHT, TEXTTOP, and TOP. The default value is BASELINE.

BORDER

beveled and measured in pixels. The default is 1.

GAIN

sets a multiplier for the amplitude display. The default is 1.

LEFTCOLOR/RIGHTCOLOR

sets the colors to be used in the spectrum. (Hexadecimal or color names may be used.)

LEFTOFFSET / RIGHTOFFSET -

raises (positive) or lowers (negative) the display of the audioscope in pixels. The default is 1.

WIDTH/HEIGHT

Establishes the dimensions of the audioscope.

MAXLEVEL

Controls whether or not (true/false) audioscope will clip a sound, based on the multiplier specified in GAIN. The default is "false".