Putting sound on an HTML page is "clunky". According to the Teacher I had for Intermediate web-development, in order to make an audio samples page, you had to have a RealAudio player console pop up every time you selected a particular sound, and you then had to press its go button also. Then there was the delay because of the streaming nature of the audio. When I tried embedding 12 three second long low quality audio samples so it wouldn't have to stream, it took so long to download the page in the first place that I think we crashed their network system completely and had to re-boot the computer.
If you make a website in Flash, the sound control would be more elegant. One click on a button (or a keyframe set up as a trigger) would be able to simply play the sound - no pop-ups. Delays on small audio files should be less likely since a streaming buffer should already be running by the time this is an issue. Streaming Media in a website is something that is still evolving a lot, as the web itself evolves to higher and higher data rates. Anything else I say about it now may already be obsolete.