Keep music playing on all pages?

[techno_race]

Remember that using frames will screw up bookmarks and search engines, since the URL for the parent doesn't change dynamically. Bookmarks will all point to the same page, no matter what page the user was on when they were bookmarked. Search engine results will point to the individual frames, so the music won't play.

Thinking about it, a possible solution for these problems would be to use anchors and Javascript together in a somewhat complicated manner. I'll work on that.

[djr33]

Thinking about it, a possible solution for these problems would be to use anchors and Javascript together in a somewhat complicated manner. I'll work on that.

I doubt this would work:
1. anchors are not used by search engines (as far as I know).
2. Javascript is arguably more messy than frames for SEO.

It would help with bookmarks, though.


One possible way around the problems would be to use PHP to dynamically change the link. (Actually, use different links, but have PHP respond differently).

In other words:
page.php?iframeurl=url.htm

So then all links would have target="parent" and the whole page would reload.

But of course that doesn't work for keeping the music playing. That just helps fix the inherent issues of frames.

I don't think there is any way around the issues of bookmarks and SEO that will work to keep the music playing.


The only option for this is what I suggested earlier: just pop out the music player in a separate window (or tab) and let the user keep them separate. It's not an "all in one" experience, but it would be effective.


Of course you could also attempt to have a complex media player that reloads on each page (it would stop playing while loading), and your position/song are saved so that when you do reload the player "remembers" where you were and continues from there. It would be a bit jumpy, but somewhat reliable.

[techno_race]

Nice thought. For example, you could find a way to track the music's position using Javascript, then set a cookie at onunload. On onload, the script would check if the cookie exists, and, if so, jump to the position in the cookie. I have, of course, absolutely no idea how to accomplish this.

[djr33]

It's relatively simple using flash. But of course that means then reprogramming the media player among other things. It's possible using other methods as well, such as Javascript making the player jump if it is possible to send a time-specific command. This is possible to program into a flash media player, so it might be able to find one, or you can even do this in some approaches to embedded media with quicktime, etc. It's not completely reliable always though, and of course still requires JS is on.
The main problem with any of that is that there is no way around the page reloading and causing a pause in the audio. If your users are going through pages quickly on a slower connection it may never load; if they are going slowly such as reading a lot of content, the momentary pause may not be too bad.