January 13, 2006
Standards-Based Web Presentations? S5 Is The Answer
S5 (Simple Standards-based Slide Show System) is a way to create web-based presentations by utilizing open standard protocols and editing pre-existing CSS-based web page templates.
S5 presentations are simply highly "intelligent" CSS-based web templates that can be created, edited and modified with any standard text editor.
S5 is a slide show format based entirely on XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript. With one file, anyone can customize a fully-web-compatible slide show while having also a printer-friendly version.
Eric Meyer's great XHTML-based slideshow software does not require dedicated commercial presentation software to be created, edited and distributed.
S5 provides an initial set of such templates which allow anyone with a minimum of CSS and HTML know-how to build multi-slide presentations that can be viewed with any major web browser.
Here some more details:
S5 features include:
- Auto-escalating of text: S5 allows the text to be self adjusted according with the current screen resolution.
- Incremental display capability: Both text and other page elements can be shown in an incremental way (one by one) just adding a simple command to the code.
- Progress indicator: The slides can be labeled as X of Y where the X is the current slide and Y is the total slides amount. It helps the presenter to get an idea of the presentations progress and modify his/her rhythm according to the available time.
- Slide bookmarks: The user can point to an specific slide in an intuitive way from other slides in the presentation.
- Keyboard controls: S5 includes a complete set of keyboard controlsto facilitate users to manipulate the presentation using the keyboard.
- Smart slides advance: S5 Users don’t have to seek for complex key combinations to advance to the next slide, but simply need to click within the presentation and it will advance. Clicks within movies, flash inserts and the navigation control will not cause an slide advance.
- Customized features: S5 offers some flexibility to its users, allowing them to choose between slide show view or outline view modes. Also users can choose if the navigation controls will be hidden or visible by default in the slide show view.
- Based on well known standards: The heart of S5 are very well known and used standards in web design as XHTML, JavaScript and CSS. That allows S5 users to benefit from each ones libraries and available materials that can be useful to enhance the presentations, and also for more skilled users, to create their own designs with these languages.
- Browser compatibility: S5 is compatible with all major existing browsers.
Some known S5 issues are:
- If a slide gets too long, the content will disappear behind the footer! So if you're planning to project at 1024x768 and have an image that's 1000 pixels tall, it isn't going to fit on a slide (unless you scale it yourself). If you have too many points on a slide, consider breaking it up into two slides with the same title. You can also edit the template to make fonts smaller and adjust content spacing, if you like, but that isn't nearly as easy.
- On a related note, if you assume one resolution and then get another, things can go seriously awry. Be prepared to edit the template in such cases. (The usual workaround for this situation is to change the font-size of the body element, although in some browsers you can simply scale the text size from the keyboard.)
You can get S5 for free: S5 belongs to the public domain, that means that anyone can use it for free.
Here is an immediate demo of S5 in action.
Take a look into the official S5 website to get more information about this new tool. Also you can get there a free copy of the initial templates.
Ready-made themes-templates for S5.
S5 Frequently Asked Questions page.
For more advanced users, S5 site also provides a complete reference page where you can see all the codes that work with S5 and slide the structures.
Another website where you can start looking for some ideas and enjoy some new S5 template designs is S5presenters. S5Presenters is used by S5 users to share their S5 templates with other users around the world.
posted by
on Friday, January 13 2006
Tuesday, January 15 2008
URL of this article:
http://masterview.ikonosnewmedia.com/2006/01/13/standardsbased_web_presentations_s5_is.htm
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