Dynamic Advertising with HTML5 - HTML5 Advertising

HTML and CSS Reference

In-Depth Information

HTML for creative:

As you can see, it's much more scalable to develop in this fashion rather than update numerous creatives when

changes need to be made down the road.

Working with XML and JSON

By now you have a fair understanding on how ads can be dynamically targeted to you as a user from an ad server point

of view, but let's shift gears a bit and talk more about the technical aspects of dynamic ads as they relate to HTML5

and the open Web. This would be particularly on the creative end of things where you can manipulate the creative

elements of your ad using data. But before you head down this path, you need to be clear on a few ways about how

your creatives can work with external data from various services. Two of the most common communication layers

when working in HTML5 are Extensible Markup Language (XML) and JavaScript Object Notation (JSON). XML and

JSON are widely adopted among the industry in that they're used in many RESTful APIs for various data endpoints.

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Note

For good information on restful apis, visit http://blog.apigee.com/detail/restful_api_design .

Using a common and universal language that all lower-level code languages can understand and parse allows

for easy adoption, communication, and ubiquity among web developers. Anything from bringing in a brand's Twitter

feed to pulling in a stock ticker, or even using a weather feed or local retail products, can be pulled into the ad creative.

It's all traditionally done using XML or JSON data, and the following sections are geared toward showing the best way

to work with external data providers with XML and JSON.

XML

XML is probably the most common language for web services. I'm not going to get into the nitty-gritty of XML, but

in the ad world, an advertisement will make a request to some web service by way of an HTTP request, usually with

some necessary URL query parameters. The response that the web service provides to that request will traditionally

be in XML format. Listing 11-1 showcases a request and XML response from Yahoo's open weather service.

Listing 11-1. Yahoo's Weather API XML Example

HTTP Request:

Server Response:

<query yahoo:count="1" yahoo:created="2012-08-01T23:15:47Z" yahoo:lang="en US" xmlns:yahoo=

" http://www.yahooapis.com/v1/base.rng " >

<title>Yahoo! Weather - Conshohocken, PA</title>

forecast/USPA0326_f.html </link>

<description>Yahoo! Weather for Conshohocken, PA</description>

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