Slashdot Mirror
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!"
Eric Meyer's site is always pretty interesting to watch, at least for web geeks like me (you know, the type who actually read the DTDs for the html and xhtml specs and play with css daily). S5 has been under development for awhile, and I hadnt gotten a chance to see it yet....
Of course, thanks to slashdot, looks like I'll have to wait till tomarrow
I mean when I went on holiday I wrote a simple slide-show page with CSS and JavaScript when I realised my laptop pretty much only had Windows and IE on it. It took about half an hour. Now, it wasn't standards based, and it wasn't as felxible as this thing, but I only ever intended it for use on pages of photos with captions on them, for the 10 days I was on holiday.
My girlfriend was ever so impressed. (I wish.)
Just seems to me there are hundreds of more interesting projects that deserve a slashdot post. Perhaps one of the admins needed a slide show program?
"What we imagine is order is merely the prevailing form of chaos"
So I open it up and it's a normal looking web page that is well done and works great. When your browser lacks javascript (or it's turned off) it looks like any other well made page. This is probably why it prints well too. Then you turn on javascript (or in my case let the little security warning from IE that came with SP2 run the script) and it's just like looking at a powerpoint presentation of the exact same data. Add a few other sets of CSS stuff and you could make it also look great for a handheld (like a Palm or some such) that might not be able to display the webpage well (assuming they can't handle the powerpoint style part here).
And it's all just XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Amazing the things that can acomplish wihtout needing Java, ActiveX, Flash, a seperate viewer (like PowerPoint), etc.
When you get someone really skilled with some pieces of technology, it's amazing the stuff they can crank out.
I know the site is down (it was for me) but get a mirror of the zip file (there are ones in other comments) and check it out if you have even the tiniest interest in this.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
If OpenOffice built this into its presentation software. It would be nice if when you save your presentation you have the option to save as an XHTML document. This would dramatically reduce file size and allow OpenOffice to be used more widely (in my opinion) for some web applications. How hard could it be to port this format (since it is open) to OpenOffice? Any Volunteers?
I like Impress also. However, I don't like the way Impress saves to the web (files way too big). It would be nice to create more simple presentations for the web with smaller file sizes. I think this new format would fit that niche.
Well, technically perhaps but not really in spirit. You could certainly say I'm biased toward a certain view of how markup language *should* be used... But take a look at the slashdot html: Let's see, the Slashdot logo at the top, maybe call it a toplevel heading? Nope, it's table data. The headline above each article, perhaps we should call it a second level heading using? Nope, table data. The paragraph summary of each article? Table data.
It may be technically correct, but lying to my browser about what is contained within those tags annoys me somewhat. In my opinion, and in the opinion of many proponents of [X]HTML+CSS, Slashdot (like most other websites) abuses the markup language, defeating the entire purpose. For some websites, they might as well serve up pdfs.
There are also significant bandwith savings to be had as show by A List Apart which has been posted numerous times before.
Perhaps you should ask your software vendor to make a more standards compliant browser?
Well, duh, it's standards compliant.
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
Well, it's a format that allows a Powerpoint-style presentation to be delivered with no software installed other than a standards-compliant browser. I'd say this is a pretty valuable piece of work.
If it uses pixels, that sucks. If it uses ems, it's not so bad, and is actually a good way of keeping the code clean while still allowing folks with high-rez monitors to use it easily.
Well, many browsers (e.g. Firefox) allow for easy font resizing, which seems to work well enough here. So I think that first point is not a major issue.
The second point seems easy to fix in the code.
Slashdot has a "light" template which was probably originally intended for lynx and ilk. It uses headings reasonably sensibly, and I read slashdot with it using my user stylesheet.
An issue at this point, not just with slashdot but with all similar sites, is that there is no decent HTML construct for marking up threaded discussions, so you either get table/css hacks or (in the rare case that the author is a fanatic) you get nested ordered lists with the markers hidden in CSS, which just makes a mess in non-CSS browsers.
You could do that with OperaShow in 2001
Wow - really?
That's amazing. I had no idea that OperaShow allowed you to display slideshows *IN ALL STANDARDS-COMPLIANT BROWSERS*
Perhaps you should write the Opera people and let them know how powerful their software is, because they're not talking about it.
Wah. Sounds like someone wants to be pedantic. The W3C recommendations are what people have to use as a reference. Being used as a reference makes them standards, even if not ISO standards.
But why am I responding to an AC troll? How you get from "I like and respect Eric Meyer" to "his proclamations about 'web standards' rather deceptive" is amusing.
Obvious possibilities include:
1. Pedant
2. Troll
3. Wishes he had as much attention and respect
phah!
Thoromyr
OK, I'll bite. In what practical way are W3C's specifications "less authoritative" than standards such as the C++ standard? For that matter, how is The Java Language Specification less authoritative than an ISO standard? The answer clearly isn't that the ISO enforces their standards, because I don't see any C++ compilers being recalled because they don't adhere to the standard.
By the way, according to the Wikipedia definition of standard , even the C++ standard isn't a standard. It seems to me that if we talk of a "C++ standard", then any widely accepted specification of a language can be referred to as a standard. And in that sense, XHTML and CSS are standards.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
I would say it's more like 80% at this point, but it's undeniable that IE's marketshare simply can't be ignored. (At least for sites I'm paid to work on -- when I create a non-business site, I could care less how it looks in IE. Yes, I am a web developer.)