Silvia Pfeiffer

A lot of interesting things are happening with audio and video in HTML 5. The dream (well my dream, anyway) of open standards-based multimedia on the web is very close. In fact it has gotten closer since this book was written (except for the looming fight over standardised video codecs). It is already dated. This is one of the unavoidable but irksome things about books written about a standard on the move, especially in dead-tree format. This book is quite dry and will probably make a good show more reference guide; conversely it didn't make exhilarating bedtime reading. It discusses the tags, attributes, CSS and JavaScript aspects of the audio and video elements in HTML; which browsers support (at time of writing, a moving target) each element and so forth. More exotic subjects include using video with SVG, captions, and Web Workers, some of which technologies were not well supported across browsers at the time of writing.Quite interesting, moderately useful but suffers from the incompleteness of the HTML 5 standard itself. show less