Center for Teaching & Learning

While spending two days in New York attending An Event Apart, I saw some cool stuff about standards-compliant web design & development, CSS best-practices, and unobtrusive JavaScript. Most of that doesn't mean much to most of the people who might happen across this blog. However, one thing that I did see that could have a profound effect in education (and education on the web) was Eric Meyer's S5.

S5 is the Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System and was running each of the presentations that was shown at AEA. The beauty of it is that it uses some basic (pre-written) JavaScript and CSS to create a "PowerPoint" style slideshow using one standards-based, semantically-written XHTML file.

The bonus of this is that since the file is already HTML-based, it's already formatted for the web. And since it's relatively lightweight and doesn't require any server-side technology, it can be easily run locally from a laptop without an Internet connection or from within an LMS like WebCT or Blackboard, and it can be viewed without CSS or JavaScript as a simple outline (which after all, is all a PowerPoint show really is) on a handheld or other such devices. And, since it uses standards-based XHTML, there's no longer the ability to destroy your presentation with PowerPoint (and its ridiculous "feature" set (read spinny/twirly things)).

S5 - A Simple, Standards-based Slide Show System

Comments

Hi, Rob. Glad to hear you enjoyed AEA! I too believe S5 could be a big deal in the education space, and in fact a lot of its success is due to educators using it. There've been some cool enhancements recently, and one feature I think will be added fairly soon is the ability to have one-to-many presentations-- where a classroom of students (or a class of remote students) all load up a copy of a slide show, and a presenter "drives" the slide show for everyone. In other words, any changes of state to the presenter's slide show would be reflected in the remote followers. I know of four such implementations, two of which didn't really scale up to a classroom setting, and two of which I don't know how scalable may be. (One of those is at http://zohoshow.com/.) So the demand is clearly there. Now it's just a matter of getting the feature added to the publicly available S5 code base.

Oh, and three presenters didn't use S5: Khoi Vinh and Jason Santa Maria, both of whom used Keynote; and Ze Frank, who used either Keynote or Powerpoint. But Jeffrey, Tantek, Aaron, and I all used it, so S5 wins!

Thanks again for the kind words and for coming to AEA.

Posted by: Eric Meyer | July 12, 2006 2:50 PM

What do you think of the rumuors this week of Google realising a powerpoint like product via the web?

The Professional Web Developer Wiki - http://www.ryanj.org/wiki

--ryanj

Posted by: Ryan Johnston | April 23, 2007 4:57 PM

Totally wicked sweet info! I will be showing this post and site to my class!

Posted by: Web Design Forum | April 25, 2007 6:13 PM

"A Web-Friendly PowerPoint Alternative" - I really learn a new concept.
Thanks
Deb

Posted by: Deb | April 27, 2007 9:16 AM

It's a nice idea I learned.

Posted by: DD web design | April 27, 2007 9:20 AM

Thanks for the info. I will check out Eric Meyer's tool. I heard Eric speak and Jared Spool's Conference a couple years ago in Boston and was very impressed with him.
Thanks again.

Posted by: Jeff Klein | May 1, 2007 10:24 AM

Thanks for this post.Nice info..

Posted by: Binod | June 7, 2007 8:29 AM

It's a very good thing that there is a worth-someone's-attention alternative to PowerPoint now.
Thanks for the info, guys!

Posted by: Alex Fawkes | June 15, 2007 7:13 AM

Is possible in this case to put presentations in the blogs ???

Posted by: Foraje | March 13, 2009 9:03 AM

It is indeed a very handy tool. I've posted a link to this function in action: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/canonical-link-tag/

Posted by: Houston Web Site Design | June 27, 2009 2:03 PM

This is awesome news!This Web-Friendly PowerPoint Alternative is great in a lot of ways.Has many advantages.Thanks for this update.

Posted by: Logo Design India | July 10, 2009 5:44 AM

Web-Friendly Alternative of powerpoint is great and it will be usefull to all.