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PowerPointLess: Eric Meyer's Full-On CSS Slide Show

I think I got here via scanning RSS from Roland Tanglao - one of the Gods of Explaining CSS to Mere Mortals, Eric Meyer has rolled out a nifty way to assemble a presentation without any touching and software from Redmond.

S⁵ is a fully web standards compliant XHMTL slide show creator- you can assemble a presentation by merely editing the text of single text file, and design it to your heart's delight via CSS. To see it in action, check out the S5 Introduction.

You get next and back buttons (also advances by space bars and arrow keys), and a hidden slide menu in the lower right corner. It plays back in any browser (well fuggedddaboutit if you use NetScape 4, go back to the 1990s ;-)

Now this is your basic text and bullet slides (about 85% of what people twiddle their time in PowerPoint doing), as an images that are used must be pre-loaded and thus slow down the initial display.

The ability to change your slide show by editing a simple text file is slick, maybe a bit too geeky for some, but it offers some potential for building tools that could generate these slide shows dynamically. People commenting on Eric's blog are already pushing the edges.