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