Subject: PowerPoint is dead. Long live XML! From: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Date: Wed, 25 Aug 1999 11:06:09 -0400 |
Last night I gave a talk on XLinks and XPointers to the XML SIG of the Object Developers' Group. The slides are available here: http://metalab.unc.edu/xml/slides/xmlsig0899/ This was adapted from Chapters 16 and 17 of The XML Bible. http://metalab.unc.edu/xml/books/bible/updates/16.html http://metalab.unc.edu/xml/books/bible/updates/17.html These chapters were originally written in Microsoft Word, then saved as HTML. Some hand editing had to be done to fix Word's exscessively presentational approach to HTML. For this talk, I started with the HTMLized version of those chapters as posted at the above URLs. I added various XML markup to split them into individual slides, bullet points, and examples while simultaneously cutting them down to a size appropriate for a presentation. I also had to clean up the original HTML so it would be well-formed XML. An XSL style sheet and James Clark's XT were used to generate the actual slides in HTML. The presentation itself was delivered from a Web browser reading the HTML files off the local hard disk. It would have been equally easy to do it straight from the Web. If you're curious you can see the original XML document at http://metalab.unc.edu/xml/slides/xmlsig0899/xml.xll and the stylesheet I used at http://metalab.unc.edu/xml/slides/xmlsig0899/slides.xsl I'm not proposing this as a general tag set for presentations, though. It's mostly just a neat hack that allowed me to prepare this one presentation a lot more easliy than would otherwise have been the case. They key developments that made this possible were the HTML output method in the latest draft of XSL (so I didn't have to worry about whether browsers could understand constructs like <br/> or <hr></hr>) and the xt:document extension function (so I could put each slide element in the input document into a separate file). This also made it very straight-forward to generate differently styled versions of the presentation for printing transparencies, reading directly on the Web, projecting onto a wall, and speaker's notes. For example, the online version simply uses the browser's default fonts. However, the versions designed for projecting onto a wall use 16-point body text and bold monospaced fonts so they can more easily be read from the back of the room. The print versions don't include navigation links. The onscreen versions do. With some additional work I think I can probably generate both the book chapter and the slides from one XML document. The speaker's notes already include a lot more text than what the audience sees. I just need to mark certain parts "book only" or "slides only", possibly using modes. I think I'm going to do all my presentations this way in the future. PowerPoint is dead. Long live XML! +-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+ | Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx | Writer/Programmer | +-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+ | Java I/O (O'Reilly & Associates, 1999) | | http://metalab.unc.edu/javafaq/books/javaio/ | | http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=1565924851/cafeaulaitA/ | +----------------------------------+---------------------------------+ | Read Cafe au Lait for Java News: http://metalab.unc.edu/javafaq/ | | Read Cafe con Leche for XML News: http://metalab.unc.edu/xml/ | +----------------------------------+---------------------------------+ XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list
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