Troubleshooters.Com Presents

The htmlslides Open Source Project

Project Charter

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Why htmlslides?
Design Manifesto
Intended Audience

Why htmlslides?

Slideshows are often created with presentation programs such as StarOffice and Microsoft Powerpoint. While these are excellent choices for many, they present portability, data accessibilty and bandwidth problems. HTML is small, universally accessible, and absolutely non-proprietary. But it's hard to author as a slideshow without the right tools.

I created htmlslides to create an HTML slideshow without needing to craft each slide individually. I wanted to author the entire show as a single file, then run a program to split that single file into a series of short HTML pages suitable for display as slides.

The content of the slideshow is determined by the single show-wide HTML file. That file delineate's individual slides with slide titles enclosed in an <address> </address> pair. The show-wide HTML file also controls the look of the actual headings and subheads. However, the look of the individual pages -- the size of the title, the placement of the navigator, copyrights and the like, are controlled by a page template. The look of the show's table of contents is controled by a table of contents template. In this way slide insertions and universal page changes can be accomplished quickly and painlessly.

After my slideshow, which was part of a presentation on the vi editor for the LEAP-CF group in Orlando FL, another speaker asked me for the software to create the slideshow. So I decided to GPL it. There are many programs to create HTML slideshows. This program distinguishes itself by being GPL

Htmlslides is written in plain vanilla Perl 5, and as such, should be fairly portable. I use it on Caldera Openlinux 2.3.

Design Manifesto

The htmlslides program is meant to produce a slideshow. By design it creates a totally linear presentation. It is *not* heirarchical. That's why this web pages were not made with htmlslides.

An HTML slideshow can certainly be produced by hand-authoring each page. The trouble with doing so is that:

Insertion of slides is error prone and time consuming.
Achieving a consistent "look" amongst all the slides is error prone and time consuming.
Navigating between separate pages for authoring activities is time consuming.

The htmlslides program's design manifesto is to solve the preceding three problems in creating HTML slideshows.

Intended Audience

The htmlslides program is intended for speakers with VGA projectors who would prefer their slides be HTML.

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