The term "presentation" has almost become synonymous with Microsoft Office PowerPoint. Yup, without doubt it is the sole leader among s/w for presenting stuff and is improving in every version, the only problem being - difficulty in sharing the presentation.
With the emergence of Web 2.0 sites like SlideShare.net, sharing ppt's on the web has become quite easy. There are several web based alternatives which are gaining popularity these days. They have the benefit of creating/editing/sharing the presentations entirely on the browser.
However, for web devs, having more flexibility on code would give better control, as they can show code/inline demos in the presentation itself! John Resig's tutorial on
Advanced JavaScript is an excellent example for the powerful
inline demos.
There are XHTML based tools which have pre-built slide show features, the famous ones being: S5 (A Simple Standards based Slide Show System) and HTML Slidy. They provide many features like navigating using keyboard shortcuts, mouse clicks etc., simulating a powerpoint presentation.
With the advent of jQuery, things have become even more easier! The recent release of jQuery 1.4 had a slideshow based on jQuery code, which was awesome.
I had my own presentation template
prepared using coda slider effect and it got good feedback :)
Now there is jQuery presentation plugin specifically for creating presentations! It came floating in my flood of tweets, thanks to Twitter & Trevor Davis (author of the plugin)!
By the way, if you want to prepare a simple slide show which slides automatically across .html files, don't struggle with complex JavaScript code. Just use the META refresh tag. Change the "URL" attribute of the tag so that it points to the next slide(html page). After the time interval set in "content" attribute is reached, automatic redirection to next slide takes place.
So lot's of interesting options for presenters/modern web devs!
Let's wait for HTML5 for more hi-fi stuff like displaying 3D transitions & making the most of canvas element in the presentation itself!
Hope this article interests budding presenters like me :) Happy presenting! 