LiveAudio, OBJECT tag, SMIL, W3C standards, please help me with my bewilderment.

[MarcMiller]

Hi
I am in the process of building a site where I thought it would be a good idea to have a little low volume onclick clicking sound on my links. I know this may be thought as a bad idea however I will have the whole site reviewed upon completion. Anyway I got this little clicking sound aspect working with a method I found on the Web namely the "play ()" method along with the embed tag. In the course of my research into how to accomplish this click sound thing I read the "embed tag" is deprecated to the "object tag." The object tag is the one which meets W3C standards. Well I do not know how to start a sound using the "object tag" rather than the "embed tag" so I went about doing more research. It appears that the"play ()" method may be a part of something called LiveAudio which is built in to Netscape browsers since version 3 which sounds very good sense I will not want my users dependent on what plug-ins they downloaded so I'm assuming modern versions of Firefox and Internet Explorer also came play the old LiveAudio sounds without plug-ins. Is this true? If this is true is there a standard compliant method that will access built in sound capabilities of the popular browsers. Besides the "object tag" I have read something called SMIL may be a standard compliant way of playing audio sounds. Is this standard compliant SMIL capable of accessing audio capabilities built into Firefox and Internet Explorer. One more thing there is a thread on a web forum I highly respect where I found this stated "I had to use sound recently. I found the only thing that worked xbrowser was removing and adding an embed element. Crappy I know but nothing else was 100% xbrowser." Well that thread was dated 03-20-2006 which is pretty recent so if that statement is true I would think it is still true so is it. I know the "embed tag" should give me some type of validation error in the HTML validator which means according to the statement I have just quoted I will have to do it the statements way if that statement is valid and I would want to have my code validate in accordance to HTML standards. The forum thread I am quoting can be found at this link. I know these are a lot of questions but if you can help me with some or all of them I would appreciate it.

Very sincerely
Marc