Presentations with s5

By Simon Willison | November 18, 2004 | JavaScript & CSS

One of the Opera browser’s best kept secrets is Opera Show, a brilliant feature which allows the easy creation and display of PowerPoint style presentations using HTML and the CSS projection media type. With s5, Eric Meyer has taken this core idea and expanded it in to a cross-browser XHTML slide show package.

s5 stands for Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System, and uses a combination of CSS, XHTML and JavaScript to turn a simple structured document in to a highly presentable set of slides. Themes are implemented using CSS and the entire package is small enough to allow for easy modification of any individual feature.

s5: An Introduction is a short example presentation which gives a short introduction to the system, or if you want to play on the bleeding edge the s5 testbed shows off the latest features. The system is currently under active development, with Eric’s weblog providing updates on new releases.

Written By:

Simon Willison

Simon is a seasoned Web developer from the UK, currently working in Lawrence, Kansas. He specializes in both client- and server-side development, and recently became a member of the Web Standards project. Visit him at http://simon.incutio.com/, and at Stylish Scripting: SitePoint's DHTML and CSS Blog.

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{ 5 comments }

yjgx007 November 19, 2004 at 11:08 am: I don’t think which’s how greats, I guess to Browser – (IE, Firefox, Opera…) will be fade out peoples sight, Browser is as a vague concept, also in IE can open Excel, PowerPoint, Word etc. which are using OLE technic, the base on browser’s tag language(HTML, XHTML, CSS2) to develop GUI(graphic user interface) have been applied to next generation MS Longhorn OS.
Si November 19, 2004 at 4:56 am: Very cool! I’ll be looking into that for the future. I can see that coming in useful for online tutorials as well!
pionar November 18, 2004 at 8:19 pm: wow. back when I had a speech class in college, I would do my outline in html because I found it quicker than fussing with word. It would have been nice to have been able to do my visual aids in it, too, instead of futzing with powerpoint.
Jacob Kaplan-Moss November 18, 2004 at 3:00 pm: You know, Keynote’s presentations are just XML files (in a package with assets)… it probably wouldn’t be too hard to convert a Keynote presentation into an s5 one (with XSLT, most likely).
Wow, I wish I had a copy of Keynote so I could try that out!
bwarrene November 18, 2004 at 2:54 pm: Phenomenal link. While I do a ton of work in Keynote on OS X (or in Power Point) – this alternative is fantastic! Thanks much!