Slide show

Excuse the meandering. I read Jeni Tennisons blog today, and found her xtech presentation page. On that page I found this zip package. In this zip package I found a readme which reads...

To view the slides, open takahashi.xul in Firefox 
with the request parameter ?data=creole.data. 
For example, if you unzipped in C:\temp\xtech\creole then use the URL:

file:///temp/xtech/creole/takahashi.xul?data=creole.data  

Trusting Jeni, I did just that and was presented with Jenis input, using this technique - (warning, in Japanese). Seems this guy came up with this as an antidote to Powerpoint. Fair enough. It's described here if you want a little more.

Seems the basics are a use of XUL to enable 'simple' slideshows. By simple I mean (IMHO) all the right things, avoiding the crap that is often seen in slideshows (you know, tons of detail, impenetrable bullshit, blah blah blah). I think this solution has it just about right. Jeni's presentation was bold, to say the least. With my eyesight I guess I could have read the slides from the back of most halls. A slide can be as simple as

----
Overlapping
Markup
----
FOOTER::overlap?
huh?
----
[[PRE:<b>bold
<i>and</b>
italic</i>:PRE]]
----

which is actually 3 slides! Now that is so much neater than messing with powerpoint! All this is written in a data file (the creole.data above and loaded via the xul file!

As you can see, I'm pretty impressed with this as a technology.

Overlapping markup

I didn't go to Paris for Xtech, so this was the first time I'd seen this presentation. It appears that the LMNL group are getting quite close to a viable solution! Based on relax NG, proven through an XSLT 2.0 implementation, markup looks quite reasonable, validation missing. Needs a clever java hacker to pickup the Jing code and extend it. This would be so neat for docbooks indexing.