What do you need to know about the changes occurring within the web advertising environment? There is a push to move from a predominantly Flash-based medium to Hypertext Markup Language 5 (HTML5), because it is a plug-in-free environment that has better page integration. This means that an advertisement will reach a larger audience, because it can be seen on mobile devices that do not support Flash. This change and all that it involves can be confusing, but John Percival has written a book that will explain the shift along with digital advertising advantages, and step readers through an HTML5 advertising campaign that can be duplicated within an organization.

As one would expect, the book’s 13 chapters are organized in a logical progression, and Percival provides explanatory notes on how best to integrate the information in the various chapters into an advertising campaign. Throughout the text, the author provides suggestions for tools and applications that can help achieve a positive result using HTML5. The author’s excitement to help and educate others, combined with his passion for HTML5, is clearly seen throughout the entire book.

The book contains an amazing amount of information on setting up ads, from legalities to highly technical information. HTML5 can be frightening when first starting out, yet it offers ingenious ways to track people and push ads onto them. Some topics discussed include proximity events and alerting web content to the presence of other physical devices. Today’s society is fine with the tracking techniques presented in the book, if used in an ethical manner by trusted parties.

The first two chapters provide a general introduction to how advertising works, and more importantly how it works on the web. Chapter 3 covers web standards from the basics of tags to cascading style sheets (CSS) and JavaScript. Chapter 4 delivers quite a good overview of HTML5 Canvas, and then details HTML5 scalable vector graphics (SVG) and web fonts. Chapters 5 to 9 continue to work through processes such as the importance of presentation, the proper use of animation and application programming interfaces (APIs), and mobile versus in-application advertising.

Chapter 10 is one of the most important chapters in the book, as it provides the heart of success: support and troubleshooting aspects. For example, clients might be using an older or non-compliant browser, so Percival details how to detect this, and how to handle it if detected, through offline and app cache examples. This is also the chapter that provides details on how to retrieve analytics for the ad campaign, which of course tells advertisers if an ad is working or not. The focus is not just on retrieving data, but also on storing and optimizing it. The chapter closes with some of the author’s own tried tips and tricks. The remaining three chapters discuss dynamic advertising, bleeding-edge HTML5 techniques, and where HTML5 is headed.

This book provides an overview of web advertising with respect to where it began, where it is, and where it’s going, in a way that is easy to understand. The book is very fun and easy to read. Novices will quickly be working through the more technical chapters, thinking, “I can do this,” while intermediate readers will be smiling and thinking, “Now that makes complete sense.” The book comes with online resources because the area of HTML5 advertising is moving faster than books can be written. Even for those who are not interested in advertising, this book could be a good aid to further understanding the HTML5 movement.

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