CSS, it’s time to enable audible web

CSS should handle sound. Period. I am not trolling. Look:

“What? A sound on hover? No way!” You may think. And you may be right. But hear me out, and see if it makes sense or not, to support sound with CSS.

A short history of computer sound

The beeper

When I was growing, we had computer lessons in primary school. Computers had these big CRT monitors, keyboards, and mouses with these giant balls. And also a beeper that looked like this:

It didn’t have too many possibilities. It beeped. You were able to change the two parameters of the sound:

• frequency
• length

You can actually do it until today because almost every computer and laptop comes with this little speaker. It is however mostly used to signal low-level errors. For example, 5 beeps mean your CPU is broken.