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?
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Ajax editor for Slidy
I have been working on this, exploring the use of contentEditable for a template based wysiwyg editor. Templates make it much easier for people to use than regular HTML editors. Here is a screen shot. Firefox and other Gecko-based browsers support something called design mode, but there are lots of usability problems that make it impractical for my needs. Luckily, contentEditable support is on its way for both Firefox and Opera.
For browsers that don’t support contentEditable, I want to use the textarea element and plain text conventions as a weaker version of wysiwyg editing. One possibility is wiki-style markup, but I think there is also room for something simpler. Ideally people would be able to instantly see the results of their editing on a keystroke by keystroke basis.
AJAX would allow changes to be reflected to the server, and it is a reasonably question to ask when the changes should be so reflected. For instance, only when the user explicitly saves the changes, or when the user is done with a given slide, or on a keystroke by keystroke basis.
This leads onto the idea of using Slidy as part of distributed presentations. AJAX could be used to drive Slidy remotely, so that the presenter can control which slide each participant is seeing. I am also thinking about integrating VoIP for the audio streams and this relates to other work I am doing on adding network based speech synthesis and recognition capabilities to browsers.
I am looking for volunteers to help with developing this as an open source project.
PerlPoint can simplify S5 production
As a related note, PerlPoint just learned to produce S5 slides (besides others, it is made to produce various result formats). As PerlPoint does not rely on XML but a readable text format writing in PerlPoint can address at least one of the big downsides mentioned in your article. I’m working on a simpler setup, too (for now one has to install a bunch of CPAN packages, but hopefully this can become an executable packed with PAR).
PerlPoint now addressing the setup downside (on Windows)
The second downside, installation, is addressed for PerlPoint on Windows now. A new distribution PerlPoint-binary-win on SourceForge contains an executable file that runs out ouf the box, without installation of Perl or modules. (To produce S5 slides, the styles from the PerlPoint::styles package are required supplementary.)
Thank you for pointing out the downsides. I was working on an easy to install solution already but your article definitely accelerated the release.
Look @ this
Look @ http://blog.amicoimmaginario.it/demo/s5generator/ A preview of a simple editor
Opengoo
OpenGoo is a really open source web office. It currently integrates a functional (but limited) S5 editor called Slime. I invite you to check ir out. Marcos
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