On the presentation compoment alternatives

[conrado]

We were discussing with Marcos (cabeza) and Ignacio about the possible Slides/Presentation component that will handle the presentations in the first version of OpenGoo. Taking their observations, I would sum the discussion and my opinions so far:

S5

This is the "official" site for the S5 project. Marcos noted that it feels 'abandoned', since the last recorded update is dated 2005.

Even though it might feel that way, I think that S5 still is the best candidate. Why? Because it is one of the only two I have seen working on both Firefox and IE, and Windows and Linux. I even managed to make a presentation for OpenGoo using S5 in less than an hour (And I assure you it would have taken me longer to do it in Powerpoint).

And besides, there is this interesting project: S5 Reloaded. This is an extension of S5 made by Christian Effenberger, who seems to have done a pretty extensive research and work. His effort gives me confidence on this direction.

SlideML
SlideML also seems abandoned, and more so than S5. The Web site is still under construction, and in bad shape. After a few minutes of search I still would not find an online sample. That is a bad sign.

SMIL
Marcos suggested using SMIL.

The main problem with SMIL is that Mozilla doesn't support SMIL. Even though there have been noble individual efforts to tackle the problem, like the work of Doug Schepers at Vectoreal, I could not find one that would transparently work with both IE and Firefox

Slidy
Slidy is another alternative, from which S5 was born. In fact, the linked Slidy presentation (first thing google retrieves for the "Slidy" search) acknowledges that Eric Meyer did in fact improve Slidy

Microsoft and Adobe
Both Microsoft and Adobe have only started clashing on a big fight for the domination of the "Multimedia Web" with their Silverlight and Flex armies.
Hopefully, the Open Source movement will stay pretty much out of the fight, and solving the problem the way it was done with Apache. I wouldn't marry with any of their solutions.

JavaFX
Sun's JavaFX is the usual Sun contender. It is closest to the OpenSource heart, but still feels too underdeveloped yet, and probably too big and complex a set for the simple solution we are seeking.

More
As usual, these are only my opinions, and there are obviously some things I am missing. Do you know what I might be missing? Please share your thoughts.

One alternative that crosses my mind is using the OpenDocument format (OpenOffice's .ods), but again, it feels too ambitious for a first approach...

Some interesting links found on researching:

S5 Tools at Microformats.org
Blog Post at Clipperz

[cabeza]

Another aternative I was looking at could be
W3C slides
This is a recommendation for presentations done in the W3C, the idea is similar to S5, so I considered it was good idea to mention it ...  just 'for the record'.

This is a tutorial for creating the slides : http://www.w3.org/Talks/Tools/how-to-use-w3ctalk-proj.html
A utility that makes it work with old browsers:
http://www.w3.org/Talks/YYMMsub/
Another w3 document about slides:
http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Offices/Presentations/xsltSlidemaker/

My (early) conclusions:
Yesterday, while doing research concerning SMIL I thought it could have been a good idea to use it. However, after doing a little bit more research on S5 I found that the standard is widely accepted and used. Moreover, there is currently some work in progress with the editor (also note that S5 offcial webpage does not have activity since July 2006 - not 2005 ). The truth be told, the simplicity and "openness" of S5 is the main reason to make me think it is the best choice.

The truth is, whichever format we choose, we must reasearch and work on conversors (pdf would be my first choice).

My approach would be to use fckeditor to help edit each slide. As fck produces html, and each S5 slide is html there should be no problems there.

PS: The credit for the idea of using SMIL goes to Ignacio, I only did a bit of research.

[ignacio]

I think the first format we should focus on is ODF. PDF is not (easily) editable and since there's an ODF plugin for Microsoft Office (http://www.sun.com/software/star/odf_plugin) by handling this format we would be allowing interoperation between OenGoo and Office or OpenOffice (on other words, interoperation between desktop and web office suites).

Concerning the use of SMIL, yes, it turned out to be a bad idea as soon as we realized that Firefox didn't support it natively. So the best options turn out to be slide engines based on html/css/javascript. And between the alternatives posted by Conrado, and these other three that I found: DOM Slides (http://icant.co.uk/domslides/), AJAX-S (http://www.robertnyman.com/ajax-s/) and Slideous (http://goessner.net/articles/slideous/slideous.html) the most complete solution turns out to be S5. Plus, I get feeling it's the most widely spread.

AJAX-S is an interesting alternative but depends on browser support for XSLT, which makes it uncompatible with some browsers. If we could move the XSLT processing to the server side that problem would be solved, but that would mean extra work and would still lack some of the features of S5 Reloaded.

Using Flash or Silverlight would allow for more bells and whistles, but both are propietary formats.