A very interesting matter, the capabilities of the new Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) standard for dealing with multimedia contents, is the subject of this book. Unfortunately, this matter is very unstable, since the W3C group is working continuously on it. Moreover, browsers are notoriously unable to implement the W3C recommendations as they exist, and Internet Explorer (IE) is so offending in this respect that it seems to be a practical joke.

Thus, the authors tried to write a book that is as up to date as possible, but they could not succeed on all points. If they had limited themselves to the parts of HTML5 that are implemented the same way in all major browsers, their book would be only about 20 pages long, while it’s more than a dozen times this length. As a consequence, readers will be as frustrated as the authors from time to time, but this book is still worthy of reading.

Chapter 1, 24 pages long, is about encoding video. It could be shorter if it presented only the necessary aspects of FFmpeg. The other tools presented are simple graphic interfaces for setting the parameters of this Swiss knife of video encoding. There are many references to an introduction, which I did not find in the book. Attributes are noted with an “@” prefix, which must not be used in coding, a rather confusing convention.

Chapter 2, 40 pages, is the most important in my opinion. It explains how you can manage video and audio elements in pure HTML5 and CSS. Some of the examples are rather trivial, especially as presented in the book, with useless, black-and-white screen copies, almost unreadable because of the matte paper. Fortunately, the book’s website allows readers to look at the results of each code example, and I recommend all readers to always watch the website as they are reading the book. In order to be exhaustive, the authors make a lot of repetitions, which could have been avoided.

I was disappointed by chapter 3, 62 pages, which deals with the JavaScript application programming interface (API). The concepts of document object model (DOM) and interface description language (IDL) are not explained clearly, and JavaScript is presumed to be already known. Above all, if HTML5 is properly implemented by the browser, all this machinery is useless. This is especially the case when the authors present two external players, which in fact are simply JavaScript programs intended to replace the browser in managing audio and video contents. Examples are verbose, illustrations are useless, and one wonders why one should know all that.

Chapter 4, 62 pages, deals with accessibility, internationalization, and navigation. It begins with a long, apparently off-topic, general discussion about these matters. One can wonder about the necessity of using the browser for doing things already well done by a multimedia player like VLC. Moreover, everything is done using JavaScript, since HTML5 is of no help. However, the chapter becomes interesting with the presentation of the new <track> tag and the new WebVTT file format. Unfortunately, most browsers still do not implement these features, and once again this shows the problem in writing a book on such a fluid matter. The accompanying website is very useful for watching this in action, but we are more and more getting away from HTML5.

Chapter 5, 36 pages, introduces the most spectacular capabilities when we display videos onto the canvas. However, this is only marginally relevant to HTML5, since the bulk of the job is made in JavaScript. Moreover, only a very small set of the applications presented have a real utility: do you frequently need to build a spiral pattern by moving a video across a web page?

Similar remarks are in order for chapter 6, 50 pages, dealing with manipulating audio through the Web Audio API. This chapter presents examples only in JavaScript, and the applications are only marginally useful for ordinary readers. In fact, using audio in web pages is very often frowned upon. Moreover, browsers implement this API with annoying variants, IE being customarily the worst offender, since it does not implement anything.

As is often the case with Apress books, the hierarchy of sections and subsections is difficult to follow when reading the chapters.