Presentation tools in the browser

With the arrival of HTML5+CSS3 the browsers are getting more attention because the new possibilities.

One example of the possibilities are the proliferation of frameworks, tools and libraries to create HTML presentations to run in the browser. No need to transform your presentation from PowerPoint or Keynote to any portable format, the content is plain HTML.

First contact

The first tool of this kind I listened was the html5slides project. You can see it in action here.

Some time later, I read a new about a new tool called deck.js. I think it is awesome, extensible and... see for yourself at the Getting Started section.

Some weeks ago I read a tweet talking about impress.js. For the moment it is only compatible with Chrome and Safari (both uses the WebKit engine) but is looks really impressive.

Many more

Knowing the previous projects I start looking for other alternatives I found a great range of projects: Landslide, html5-slideshow (see a demo here), pow (see in action here) or DZSlides, a one-page-template to build your presentation in HTML5 and CSS3.

Within this maremagnum of possibilities the confusion is assured: which tool is better? which is easy to use? which has more effects? which one is more flexible and/or extensible? which want has more followers and/or supporters? which one will survive in the future?

 The future

Currently, all these tools are great but they all are oriented to a web developer user with strong knowledge on HTML and CSS.

The next step is clear, adapt to plain users (a user without web technologies knowledge). The tools needs an editor to help in the creation of the slides, like PowerPoint or Keynote.

There are projects working on this direction, like the 280Slides. It is implemented in Cappuccino framework and brings the user a Keynote like editor to visually create the slides.

More history

If you want to know a bit more about the evolution of the presentation tools, I encourage you to read this great article from Luigi Montanez.