San Bei Ji

Sayonara PowerPoint

Here is an awesome alternative to PowerPoint using standards-based web design techniques, courtesy of Eric Meyer: S⁵: A Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System

S⁵ is a slide show format based entirely on XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript. With one file, you can run a complete slide show and have a printer-friendly version as well. The markup used for the slides is very simple, highly semantic, and completely accessible. Anyone with even a smidgen of familiarity with HTML or XHTML can look at the markup and figure out how to adapt it to their particular needs. Anyone familiar with CSS can create their own slide show theme. It’s totally simple, and it’s totally standards-driven.

Why? Well for one thing, the beauty of this is that it requires no other software than the web browser you already have. No PowerPoint Viewer, no Acrobat Reader, no Flash Plug-In. It is very lightweight - very friendly as an email attachment or as a web delivery that won’t frustrate the end user with gigantic file sizes or incompatible file formats. It is easy to use, looks good, and serves it’s purpose very well. Nice work. I can definitely see applications for this sort of thing.

Of course as Edward Tufte would point out, one would hope that the content placed therein does not diminish the analytical quality of one’s presentation, and that this is used properly as a presentation tool and not a replacement for essay where essay is required…