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PBX My name is Paul Bissex, and e-scribe.com is my consulting business. I build web applications using as much open source software as possible. From September to June I teach web design and other important non-photographic professional skills to photographers. In the '90s I wrote technology commentary and reviews for magazines, newspapers, and web publications, including Wired, Salon.com, FamilyPC, the late lamented Web Review, and the Chicago Tribune. Feel free to email me.

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by Paul Bissex
and E-Scribe New Media

Browser-based slideshows in XML: AJAX-S

I'm a long-time fan of Eric Meyer's S5 browser-based presentation system. (In fact, I've been working on a TextMate bundle for it. Though the code to produce an individual slide is very simple, it still can be a bit fussy when you're producing a lot of them.)

Robert Nyman's new AJAX-S system is unabashedly inspired by S5, but places slide content in a separate XML file that then gets rendered into HTML by Javascript.

For a first-day, prototype effort, it's really impressive. I think Robert should have chosen a more low-key name, though ("Spud" is my suggestion). The term "Ajax" sets up a lot of flashy-GUI expectations. Flashy GUI tricks wouldn't be out of place in a presentation solution, but they aren't present in this first version. I can see the Slashdot comments now.

In case you're curious, here's some example XML for a slide in AJAX-S: 

<page>
    <heading>About ZomboCom</heading>
    <content>
        <paragraph>This is ZomboCom.</paragraph>
        <image>
            <source>images/zombocom.gif</source>
            <alternatetext>logo</alternatetext>
            <layout>left</layout>
        </image>
        <paragraph>We enable stuff.</paragraph>
    </content>
</page>

Here's an analogous slide as it might be done in S5: 

<div class="slide">
    <h1>About ZomboCom</h1>
    <p>This is ZomboCom.</p>
    <img src='images/zombocom.gif' alt='logo' />
    <p>We enable stuff.</p>
</div>

So it doesn't win on concision, and in general has a lot of maturing to do to catch up to S5, and has some sharp edges like requiring embedded HTML to be entity-fied or placed inside a CDATA block. But I think the potential for this idea is huge. If you're running IE 6 or a Mozilla-based browser, check out the demo now.

Sunday, November 13th, 2005

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