S5 is a new way of delivering presentations through a browser instead of through a proprietary application like PowerPoint, by using CSS standard-based technology.
In essence S5 is a very flexible, standards-based, lightweight slide-show system. In S5, one XHTML document provides all of the slide show's content while the CSS handles the layout and look of each one of the slides.
CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, are in effect invisible style sheets reference files that when attached to documents describe how the document is displayed or printed, (e.g. a CSS sheet is attached to an HTML document, to influence its layout when accessed via a browser). The CSS technology supports a functionality called "cascading", which allows a single document to have the ability to respond to two or more style sheets that are than applied according to specified priorities (=cascade). JavaScript handles the dynamic aspects of the show.
S5 is the brainchild of Eric A. Meyer who, with minimal scripting, has recreated and improved upon a (currently) browser-specific technology originated by the Opera browser, making it cross-browser and more capable in the process.
Opera 4 was the first to introduce Opera Show, a projection-mode style sheet technology that allowed something very similar to what S5 does now. That is, allowing a single XHTML document to be turned into a full PowerPoint-like slide show.
Later, Tantek Çelik created a JavaScript-driven slide show technique that worked on multiple browsers. Unfortunately, it required each slide to be ID'ed ahead of time, making additions and rearrangement quite difficult. Navigation was only linear; no way to jump to an arbitrary slide. There was also no facility to "switch off" the slide show styles short of killing all CSS.
Such situation gave motivation and inspiration to Eric A. Meyer to develop S5. S5 builds in fact on Tantek's scripts and ideas, with input and ideas from several other people.
Technically, in S5 each slide is enclosed in a classed div and IDs are dynamically assigned via JavaScript.
One nice feature is that the final navigation menu for the presentation gets to be automatically built at run-time. This menu auto-hides itself when not used and it displays itself in the form of a drop-down menu appearing on request when hovering your mouse on the lower right section of the slide display.
The Advantages
- With one file, you get a slide show, a printable outline, and a screen presentation
- Files are incredibly lightweight and compress easily
- Thanks to being semantic XHTML, slideshow files are also highly accessible
- New slide themes can be created simply by writing new style sheets
- Unlike Opera Show, which has all of the above advantages, S5 works in multiple browsers
A Few Limitations
- Only one author can be listed in the metadata
- Links from within a slide to another slide will probably fail
- Slide content is expected to be static and atomic; that is, there is no capability to trigger dynamic slide content by hitting the "next" command
- Fonts are not scaled based on display resolution and available pixels; manual CSS editing is required
Licensing
S5 is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license: if you submit a contribution, you are agreeing to abide by and place your contributions under the CC license mentioned above.
Anyone can freely use S5 for their own presentations, and modify S5 if they agree to honor the license.
The S5 format is OSF 1.0 compatible.
More info here:
A Basic Primer in Using S5 — pretty much what it sounds like.
S5 Reference — a full reference describing what markup is required, what is recommended, and what is optional in an S5 presentation file.
Minimal S5 Structure — a guide to the absolute bare minimum markup used in an S5 slide file.
S5 File Map — explains what files are where, and what each one does.
S5 FAQ — it may not answer all your questions, but it will answer the common ones.
