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.