In the case with Austin Town Hall i’d have to re-encode thousands of MP3s, upload them by hand to properly associate them to one of the 6000+ posts, teach our editors how to do that in the future, and then implement a system of custom fields to support both types of audio files.

When this falls on Occam’s Razor, we see that the simplest solution, the best solution, is for FF to just support MP3 so we can all move on.

<audio controls autobuffer>
  <source src="elvis.ogg" />
  <source src="elvis.mp3" />
  <!-- now include flash fall back -->
</audio>

Source: HTML5 Doctor

Again, I agree, its alot more work for the developer, but if you provide the right formats, it should improve the user’s experience.

According to that article, Firefox does have the unfortunate problem of not actually falling back to another format, but if you put .ogg before .mp3, everyone should play nice.

This is all totally theoretical (for me), as I have yet to try out </audio> and </video>. But as much as I’ve read, the solution seems solid.

The problem with degradation in this circumstance is Firefox’s fall back for audio+mp3 is the black X. Which is maybe more simply my point. You have get into feature detection (with modernizr or what have you) to determine if MP3 is supported by the browser and then implement a fall back.

The IE6-8 fallback is to ignore the audio tag and just output what’s in between. That would be the preferred fallback if the browser doesn’t support that type of audio. Ironically, IE beats Firefox in this.

But even more importantly, there is really no excuse for not supporting MP3 on the world wide web.

I look forward to the day I never have to download a plugin again.