Presenting with S5

A. Eliens

Creative Technology

What Is S5?

• It's a Simple Standards-based Slide Show System
• One XHTML document provides all of the slide show's content
• CSS handles the layout and look of the slides
• JavaScript handles the dynamic aspects of the show
• That's all there is to it!
• download it via tutorial 3 or directly from tools/s5

intermezzo

Operatic Origins

• Opera 4 introduced Opera Show, a projection-mode style sheet technology
• Allows a single XHTML document to be turned into a PowerPoint-like slide show
• Adding screen and print style sheets allows for multi-medium views of a single document
• Highly efficient, but highly browser centric...

Expanding The Field

• When Opera 7.5 for OS X came out, the banner ads persisted in projection mode
• Tantek Çelik created a JavaScript-driven slide show technique that worked on multiple browsers
  • Unfortunately, it required each slide to be ID'ed ahead of time, making additions and rearrangement difficult
  • Navigation was only linear; no way to jump to an arbitrary slide
  • There was also no facility to "switch off" the slide show styles short of killing all CSS
• Motive and opportunity combined to point the way...

Where We Are Now

• S5 builds on Tantek's scripts and ideas, with input and ideas from several other people
• Each slide is enclosed in a classed element; IDs are dynamically assigned via JavaScript
• Navigation menu is automatically built at run time
• The S5 format is compatible with Opera Show Format 1.0, making it easy to move slides between the two formats as needed
• S5 can also run slide shows based on XOXO

How It Works

• Controls are...
  • Next slide: Space bar, return, right arrow, down arrow, page down, click anywhere in slide that isn't in the control area (lower right corner), click "arrow" in lower right corner, accesskey "X"
  • Previous slide: Up arrow, left arrow, page up, click "arrow" in lower right corner, accesskey "Z"
  • Toggle the slide styles: Click on the toggle button (to the left of the arrows), press "t", accesskey "T"
  ...plus more!
• To invoke the navigation menu: mouse into the lower right corner of the slide (below the navigation arrows)

The Advantages

• With one file, you get a slide show, a printable outline, and a screen presentation
• Files are incredibly lightweight and compress easily
• Thanks to being semantic XHTML, slideshow files are also highly accessible
• New slide themes can be created simply by writing new style sheets
• Unlike Opera Show, which has all of the above advantages, S5 works in multiple browsers

S5 Default File Structure

S5 Themes

(just a sampling)

Features New to 1.1

• Incremental display of slide content
• Font scaling based on window size
• Support for PNG alpha channels in all supporting browsers, including IE/Win
• Ability to jump to any slide, or skip a number of slides, via keyboard commands

Incremental Animation

• A demonstration of just one of the many ways to accomplish simple animation-like effects (using a diagram from "XFN and...")

Current Limitations

• Only one author can be listed in the metadata
• Opera falls back to use OperaShow; thus no extras (like the navigation menu or progress indication) are available
• Images are not scaled along with the text when the window size changes

Open To The Public

• S5 1.1 is released under an explicit Public Domain license
• Contributors to S5 must be willing to accept those terms
  • In other words: if you submit a contribution, you are agreeing to abide by and place your contributions into the Public Domain along with S5
  • On the other hand, anyone can freely use S5 for their own presentations or modify S5 to suit their needs

In Summary

• With minimal scripting, we have recreated and improved upon a (currently) browser-specific technology, making it cross-browser in the process
• New themes are just a matter of writing a new style sheet
• The S5 format is OSF 1.0 and XOXO compatible
• S5 is a very flexible and lightweight slide show system available for anyone to use