OwlManAtt’s Blog

As of 2006-03-20 21:00, OwlManAtt.com has ended its support for the Microsoft Internet Explorer web browser.

This suddent EOL’ing of IE support comes as part of my move to true XHTML. The web consortium recommends the content-type of application/xhtml+xml for XML documents. Internet Explorer (IE7 included) does not properly support this content-type. All you will get is a download file screen for the XHTML.

Sorry kids, it’s been fun, but it’s time to get with the program. XHTML or bust.

Howdy folks. Yesterday, I announced that I had begun working on a dohickey called ‘S7′. In this annoucement, I discoursed on my inspiration for S7 and the renderer I had completed, yet gave barely any detail on the S7 Creator GUI I have in mind. I wish to fix this.

In my mind, the S7 Creator will be a web application that will be accomodating of users working together on the same slideshow, at the same time. This will sort of take a [controlled] wiki approach; anyone who is ‘on the project’ can add, delete, edit, and re-order slides and content items on those slides. Now, that does not mean that single users will not find S7 to be useful, because you can still create slideshows on your own.

You might be wondering, why would anyone want to work together on a slideshow? What niche does this fill?

Highschools, for one. It seems as if it is some kind of status symbol for highschool teachers to get everything from their students in slideshow format. Group projects, however, throw a mitersaw into this plan - students can’t crowd around one computer and be adding six slides at once, all together. PowerPoint is built for one user editing a show at a time. A stupid limitation, I know, but PowerPoint isn’t Web 2.0 hip. [Yes, yes, the second Web 2.0 reference this week. If you want my address so you can come and beat me with a 2×4, just ask.]

Now, on paper this sounds like a nifty idea. In practice, it’s a fucking pain in the ass to implement. I need to determine how to establish locks on content, so users don’t step on each other’s toes. I’ve pondered it, and I only have one area in which I am not sure as to the most effective locking procedure. But this is for me to worry about, unless you want to get involved.

A user can share presentations with people, or set them as private. A gallery of presentations with the most views will be available, as will other charts. If bloggers can spend all day writing posts about taking a nap, maybe people will make slideshows about it, too.

S7 Creator is going to use a lot of AJAX and DHTML-ish tricks to make the creation of slideshows painless. I have a bunch of sketches of add screens that take only one or two clicks to add and organize content. It’ll be hot.

So yeah.

Back during November ‘05, Chuck Hagenbuch gave a presentation to SCOSUG about Horde. It was an excellent presentation, which prompted me to set up my own Horde installation, but there was one aspect of the night that really got me.

Did you click on the ‘presentation‘ link? If you didn’t, you really should. Clicked it? Looked through it? Good. Now noticed that the slideshow software is web-based?.

Holy shit batman! BROWSER-BASED SLIDESHOW TECHNOLOGY? The potential is incredible!

The technology is called S5, or Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System. The project is lead by a bloke named Eric Meyer, and it’s all in the public domain.

From the S5 site:
S5 is a slide show format based entirely on XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript. With one file, you can run a complete slide show and have a printer-friendly version as well. The markup used for the slides is very simple, highly semantic, and completely accessible. Anyone with even a smidgen of familiarity with HTML or XHTML can look at the markup and figure out how to adapt it to their particular needs. Anyone familiar with CSS can create their own slide show theme. It’s totally simple, and it’s totally standards-driven.

S5 is a standard HTML document, combined with some Javascript and CSS. That presentation you saw - yeah, that was a single HTML document. Impressive, huh?

By itself, S5 might be good for those users who are unafraid of sticking their fingers in to an HTML document and learning how to use unordered lists. Unfortunately, that falls woefully short of being a PowerPoint killer and a proponent to Web 2.0 (yes, I know, shoot me).

S5 Presents is a Ruby-On-Rails application that lets you build presentations through your web browser, then renders them out for viewing with S5.

The designing of slides involves using the Markdown syntax, which is still not much of a PowerPoint killer. You can sort of share presentations (I don’t think you can collaberatively build them, though), so this still falls short of being on the forefront of Web 2.0.

Now, ever since I saw S5 in action on that fateful night, I’ve been meaning to make it database driven. I have some great concepts for an online slideshow builder, too, but that will come with time. For now, I only have some scripts to get a presentation out of a relational database and render it as an S5 presentation.

I give you the Slightly Snarled S5, or S7, renderer, alpha one. It is a complete implementation of the S5 1.1 reference. Unfortunately, building slideshows through PhpMyAdmin sucks, but this is something.

This takes S5 Presents a bit further in that instead of a slide having stuff on it, slides have individual ‘content items’ (as do the handouts that go with the slides). I think this would make it easier to re-order talking points when it comes to the UI.

So yes. Perhaps I am suffering from Not Invented Here Syndrome, but meh. It’s something fresh, and who knows, maybe I’ll end up making something of it and being bought by Google so I can retire when I finish highschool.