David,
Thanks for your message:
Given a microphone capturing application that can
capture a spoken phrase to a named file, the current
HTML file upload form element is sufficient to upload
that voice clip.
That is absolutly right, and it captures the essense of
why the W3C should take an affirmative stance to
standardize microphone upload. Suppose you are developing
a spoken language instruction system using asyncronous
audio conferencing. If you wanted to provide for students
on several different platforms, you would have to provide
a microphone capture application for each of them. Then,
when the participants used your system, they would have
to record, save to a file, select that file, and upload it
as seperate operations, switching between the browser and
microphone capture application each time. If microphone
upload were standardized, I estimate that it would save
over ten mouse and key-clicks per upload, without having
to distribute a supplemental application for each platform.
MIME e-mail can carry voice clips and comments between
teacher and student perfectly well.
Only a few mail user agents provide that capability. Back
in late 1996 some language instructors on one of the distance
education lists (DEOS?) or newsgroups were claiming that
voice-email presents more trouble than it is worth, at least
for some students.
Streaming microphone data as something which would be part
of a standard...
The device upload spec isn't for streaming, it uses only
TCP-based HTTP POST enctype="multipart/form-data" HTML form
submissions; see:
http://www.bovik.org/device-upload.html
Cheers,
James