Standards-Based CSS/XHTML Slide Show

sootman writes "Eric Meyer, the man behind the famous Complex Spiral (CSS) Demo page, is at it again. He has created S5, "a slide show format based entirely on XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript." As he says, "With one file, you can run a complete slide show and have a printer-friendly version as well. The markup used for the slides is very simple, highly semantic, and completely accessible." So it can be used for PowerPoint-like work and the show responds to a variety of input--you can go to the next slide by pressing Return, Right, Space, etc. It is being released under a Creative Commons license. So fire up our favorite standards-compliant browser and check it out!"

Oh, the irony - slashdot talking about standards?

[Corporate Gadfly]

Wow... the irony. Slashdot is talking about standards. Isn't it about time that /. itself should be standards compliant?

BTW, to make this comment on topic, the slideshow looks pretty decent, but I wouldn't consider this ground breaking stuff. Eric Krock (netscape technology evangelist) was doing these sort of presentations [mozilla.org] in the 1998/1999 timeframe.

Excellent powerpoint killer

[raahul_da_man]

This is an excellent example of the Web applications that Microsoft feared. Even though it is crude, and it has one killer limitation:

* Fonts are not scaled based on display resolution and available pixels; manual CSS editing is required

And a massively annoying one:

* Only one author can be listed in the metadata

I'm not quite sure why the second limitation exists. But already this program does all of the important functions I need Powerpoint for, and it has one big advantage over powerpoint .. the html version looks far prettier on the web than powerpoint does.

I was highly intrigued to learn about Opera's powerpoint alternative and previous attempts in this direction. This may be the first web app that I use all the time.

Apple Keynote

[Queer Boy]

It would be awesome to see Apple incorporate this into the next version of Keynote [apple.com] to have a cross-platform way to export presentations.

Also makes me wish Microsoft supported more of the CSS standard on IE. I've been using CSS since '99 and almost every interesting effect breaks in IE Win. Thankfully more Windows users are using alternative browsers for security reasons.

Now if only Slashdot would validate! [w3.org]

Too bad it's /.ed

[lux55]

I'd like to see if it's compatible with Dean Edwards' IE7 script [edwards.name]. If so, it could almost be considered cross-browser compatible enough for general use.

Guess I'll have to look for a mirror...

Re:Oh, the irony - slashdot talking about standard

[magefile]

For some websites, they might as well serve up pdfs.

Don't even joke about that - Acrobat is slow, buggy, crash-prone, backwards-combatible. And on Windows (yes, I have to use it sometimes), it always tries to install something called "Microsoft Journal Viewer". PDFs suck ass for web presentation - although they are nice for non-live stuff.

Re:Apple Keynote

[Midnight Thunder]

It would be awesome to see Apple incorporate this into the next version of Keynote to have a cross-platform way to export presentations.

It is an interesting idea, though I am just wondering what this has over other solutions such as PDF?

Re:Oh, the irony - slashdot talking about standard

[Midnight Thunder]

Looks someone tried to create a standards compliant theme [slashcode.com], in 2002. I haven't really investigated much to see where they finally got to, but looking at one of the comments [slashcode.com] make me wonder what the oldest browser /. should work in?

Example presentation using s5

[Tumbarumba]

I needed to create some slides last week for a presentation to my company's Best Practice group. After working out the actual content I wanted, it took me all of 20 minutes to create the content using s5.

Here's the final result: Introduction to CruiseControl [exubero.com]

Mozilla users can switch to alternative stylesheets using the switcher on the status bar.

Re:Excellent powerpoint killer

[Sweetshark]

But already this program does all of the important functions I need Powerpoint for ...
Take a look at prosper [colorado.edu] or latex-beamer [sourceforge.net] - the results are superior to everything Powerpoint comes up with ...
The real problem is to to provide a click-and-point interface to easily create these presentations. And LaTex is a real good backend, but it shows its age here and there (for the web a XML-based language would be an advantage for example ....)