What's the Problem?

• Popular use case are lectures and courses
• Layouts should be applied to a set of presentations
• Presentations should be interlinked (presentations as hypertexts)
• Structuring (possibly nested) is necessary for better presentations
• Additional features may be necessary to better support authors

Complex presentations require a lot of effort to create and maintain them anyway, so why not go all the way? Content Management has become popular for HTML quite a while ago (and for very good reasons!), why not apply the same principles to presentation material?

Motivation

• Presentation programs often are based on a sales pitch perspective
  • it is important to have fancy layouts and animations
  • it is important to be able to quickly put together a presentation
  • it is not important to be able to manage complex presentations
  • it is not important to support presentations as evolving content
• Current solutions for creating presentations are not satisfying
  • they are purely based on a presentation perspective
  • tools for a content perspective are hard to find

Why not PowerPoint? Or OpenOffice?

• PowerPoint is well supported in the Windows world
• OpenOffice for non-Office and/or non-Windows environments
  • PowerPoint ↔ OpenOffice can have surprising results
  • for non-trivial presentations, PowerPoint is a lock-in product
• PowerPoint produces inaccessible presentations
  • they can be presented only with proprietary software
  • they cannot be searched or reused
  • publishing as PDF is possible but not a good solution
• Managing sets of presentations is not supported
  • a very frequent use case for lectures and courses
  • layout changes have to re-applied to multiple presentations
  • keeping presentation sets consistent over time is hard work

Why not Slidy? Or S⁵?

• Web-based presentation tools are a big step in the right direction
  • they provide directly publishable and accessible information
• Slidy and S⁵ are the two most popular packages
  • developed independently
  • both using standards-compliant CSS and JavaScript for presentation features
  • they work well with most modern browsers
• Managing sets of presentations is not supported
  • a very frequent use case for lectures and courses
  • layout changes have to be re-applied to multiple presentations
  • keeping presentation sets consistent over time is hard work

XSLidy to the Rescue!

• Creating HTML by hand often is not a good idea
  • Content Management Systems (CMS) provide better publishing support
  • XSLidy can be regarded as CMS for Slidy as the target format
  • Slidy code is never edited, it is always generated
• XSLidy adds XSLT's power to Slidy's elegance
  • presentations are more than just a bunch of slides (they have structure)
  • based on this structure, it is possible to create better presentations
  • XSLidy automates what would be manual labor in Slidy
• XSLidy is not a part of Slidy, it is a separate layer
  • generated files are regular Slidy files and can be used without XSLidy
  • XSLidy content is a mixture of XSLidy elements and HTML content

XSLidy Requirements

• XSLidy should:
  • support people frequently dealing with large and complex presentations
  • produce good Slidy code leveraging available Slidy features
  • avoid redundancies across the whole presentation set whenever possible
  • enable cross-presentation linking
  • use a reasonably simple schema so that it is not a lock-in solution
• XSLidy does not have to:
  • provide support for advanced layout beyond Slidy's capabilities
  • provide built-in mechanisms for producing results on paged media

The Big Picture

• A Slidy layout is required as a starting point
  • the default W3C Slidy layout or any other Slidy layout is usable
  • maybe extended by a layout for outline slides
• Creating content can be done using any XML editor
  • most content will be XHTML, structured by (i.e., contained in) XSLidy Elements
• The complete presentation is one XML document
  • XML editors with good outline features make editing much easier
  • having everything in one document makes it easy to generate a consistent set of presentations
• After any change to the XSLidy document, everything must be regenerated
  • required to keep cross-presentation links up-to-date
  • not expensive in terms of time and space (existing files will be replaced)

Creating XSLidy Content

• Knowledge of HTML is required (most content is HTML)
  • most content will use a very small set of HTML element
  • some HTML constructs can be replaced with special XSLidy elements
• Knowledge of XHTML is a plus
  • XSLidy only accepts XML, so HTML must be entered as XHTML
  • moving from HTML to XHTML is easy (some minor syntax issues)
• Knowledge of Slidy is a plus
  • XSLidy generates Slidy content from the XSLidy source
  • if only existing presentation styles are being used, Slidy can be left alone
  • creating new presentation styles requires advanced Slidy wizardry

How XSLidy Content Looks

• XSLidy does hide Slidy from the user
• XSLidy does not hide XHTML from the user
• Content is a mixture of XSLidy content and XHTML
  • XSLidy content is processed and mapped to Slidy-specific XHTML
  • XHTML content is copied through (more or less) unaltered
• In theory, XSLidy and XHTML are different namespaces
  • XSLidy documents should use the XSLidy and the XHTML namespace
  • most people do not like dealing with namespaces very much
  • unknown XSLidy elements are assumed to be (and thus mapped to) XHTML elements

XSLidy Example

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<?xslidy part-slide-count="all" ?>
<?xslidy part-slide-text=" (*)" ?>
<?xslidy slidy-prefix="slidy/" ?>
<?xslidy style-uri="slidy/w3c-blue.css" ?>
<?xslidy xslidy-prefix="." ?>
<xslidy xmlns="http://dret.net/xmlns/xslidy/1" xml:lang="en">
 <title short="XSLidy">XSLidy — Slidy Slideshow Generator</title>
 <author><a href="http://dret.net/netdret/">Erik Wilde</a></author>
 <layout src="layout.xml"/>
 <toc id="html-toc" name="toc.html">
  <table><for-each-presentation>
   <tr><th><presentation-link><title/></presentation-link><br/><slides>(* Slides)</slides></th></th></tr>   
  </for-each-presentation></table> 
 </toc>
 <style type="text/css">
  pre { white-space: pre-wrap ; word-wrap: break-word }
 </style>
 <presentation id="intro" cover="slidycover">
  <title short="Introduction">XSLidy Introduction</title>
  <toc id="html-toc">This is an introductory presentation ...</toc>
   <part id="motivation">
    <title>Motivation</title>
     <slide>
      <title>What's the Problem?</title>
      <list>
       <li>Popular use case are lectures and courses</li>

Processing XSLidy Content

• XSLidy is an XSLT 2.0 program (a.k.a. stylesheet)
• The input is an XML document according to the XSLidy XML Schema
  • which may refer to other XSLidy files or styles (XSLidy or Slidy)
• The output is a set of Slidy XHTML presentations
  • and an optional presentation navigator (an HTML snippet)
• XSLidy is designed for reusable content and accessible presentations
  • XML as source means easy to generate and process
  • Slidy XHTML as output means accessible and portable presentations
• Detailed information available at: Setting up and Using XSLidy

Conclusions

• XSLidy is probably not interesting for you if you ...
  • ... want to use a graphical user interface
  • ... have small and not heavily structured presentations
• XSLidy is probably interesting for you if you ...
  • ... can live with manually creating XML
  • ... are capable of running a Java program
  • ... routinely deal with large and complex presentations
• If you think XSLidy is good, but not good enough ...
  • ... then you can easily write your own XSLidy Extensions
• Available at http://dret.net/projects/xslidy/