This post from the Sun BabelFish about Slidy reminds me that there is no significant ongoing effort aimed to replace the ubiquitous MS Powerpoint with a Web 2.0 service, at least that I’m aware of.

Nonetheless a bunch of descriptive formats for slide shows have been recently relesead, notably: S5 by Eric Meyer, Slide ML by Bitflux, PerlPoint by Jochen Stenzel and Slidy by Dave Raggett of W3C.

To me, Slidy and S5 appear to be the more mature and complete projects. The constrains they impose on slide show layouts and features are negligible for most regular Powerpoint users.

They offer:

• Keyboard shortcuts for moving between slides
• Automatically generated table of contents
• Incremental display of slide content
• Automatic font scaling based on window size
• CSS positioning of objects
• Incremental animation
• Free license

The big downsides are the complexity to setup the production environment and the requirement to edit xhtml files in a text editor.

A simple but good Ajax wysiwyg editor is very much missing! The only attempts is from Bitflux with the Biflux Editor, but the complexity for a standard user is still overwhelming.

I cannot believe that no Web 2.0 start-up is focusing on the slide shows business. Company employees are sicking tired of attaching presentations to their email messages. The receivers are tired to download and save them somewhere on their machines. Solve this problem and you could smell money.

Here is a free advice to anyone interested in building a new secretive Web 2.0 company: take the best of Writely and NumSum and apply it to slide shows, don’t forget to be Slidy and S5 compliant!

And now a short checklist of features:

• Sharing and tagging presentations
• CSS template library, huge, open and freely available
• CSS template editing capabilities
• Easy presentation embedding in blog and corporate sites
• Complete storage solutions (image and audio file included)
• Export to PDF and printer friendly versions

Enough for launching a beta. Later you can add more bells and whistles. Anyone interested?