Using S5 at Manchester

S5 is a very slick slide show system based on (X)HTML, CSS, and just a touch of Javascript.  I used to use (one version of) the W3C's Slidemaker system, but S5 is so much nicer. No Perl, you work with a single (X)HTML file and end up with a single file (plus stylesheets and images), and the behavior is generally much much nicer.

I've hacked up a University of Manchester theme for S5, and it looks pretty durn nice. I find it very easy to make S5 presentations using Nvu, which is really quite slick, overall. (Though, save often. It's a bit prone to crashing on me when I play with "Source" mode. In general, if you need to hack a lot of source, you are better off switching to a text editor.)

To make your own presentation, download the zip file containing:

• A blank S5 template (an HTML file)
• A directory ui/default containing all the CSS and images for the layout

Caveats

This was a total rush job so I could use it in a presentation. Notably, I just edited the S5 bundled style sheets directly, which, frankly, is rather gross. I hope to make a nicer version quite soon (i.e., a distinct theme). You should keep your own version of the stylesheets. At some point, it will make sense to have "site wide" verisons.

This ain't PowerPoint, Keynote, or OpenOffice. CSS is the way to go, and raw CSS hacking is pretty much like raw TeX hacking. Simple presentations are quite simple.

Inline animation involves either CSS hackery (preferred) or Javascript hackery. Right now, I find "flipbook" animation (i.e., having multiple slides) to be easiest and most robust.

Check your presentation carefully at the size you'll be displaying. If that gets messed up, things go to hell.

Too long slides are cropped, not scrolled (as in SlideMaker), so you have to take care.

Presentations using S5

I'll keep a list here of talks using my template, especially if they do something interesting (e.g., animation).

• SPARQLing Queries
• By Bijan Parsia for the Reasoning on the Web 2006, Summer School
• Uses most features, though I ripped out the overlay animation because it was icky, especially in overview mode. Email me if you want to try in one slide animation.

Future Plans

I definitely want to clean up my modifications so they are easier to migrate to future versions of S5. I also need to test things with more browsers. Also, S5 doesn't cover a lot of common cases, e.g., ordered lists. Plus the style for <code> isn't very workable for me.

I love the handout feature, though I never use it (lack of time and energy). What I would love to have is a way that arbitrary people could add notes, especially questions, answers, extra links, etc. A little CGIing or Ajaxing should make this quite feasible, or one could set up an Annotea like system (but I like having them in-band).

I would like to make animation and other jazzy features easier. So, either some tweaks or a tutorial or both.