S⁵: An Introduction

Eric A. Meyer

Complex Spiral Consulting

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!

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 div; IDs are dynamically assigned via JavaScript
• Navigation menu is automatically built at run time
• A "toggle slide style off/on" ability now exists
• The S⁵ format is compatible with Opera Show Format 1.0, making it easy to move slides between the two formats as needed

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"
• 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)

Current Limitations

• Only one author can be listed in the metadata
• Links from within a slide to another slide will probably fail
• Slide content is expected to be static and atomic; that is, there is no capability to trigger dynamic slide content by hitting the "next" command
• Fonts are not scaled based on display resolution and available pixels; manual CSS editing is required
• Opera falls back to use OperaShow; thus no extras (like the navigation menu or progress indication) are available

Open To The Public

• S⁵ is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 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 under the CC license mentioned above
• On the other hand, anyone can freely use S⁵ for their own presentations, and modify S⁵ if they agree to honor the license

In Summary

• With minimal scripting, we have recreated and improved upon a (currently) browser-specific technology, making it cross-browser in the process
• The S⁵ format is OSF 1.0 compatible
• S⁵ is a very flexible and lightweight slide show system available for anyone to use