xmlSlides

xmlSlides was a prototype for an application that can create html/javascript based presentation slides. It takes an xml document as input and transforms it with XSLT into one of many HTML based slide formats. This project was the topic of the theses of my bachelors degree in computer science in 2010.

The starting point for this project was the dissatisfaction with existing presentation slide applications. When the idea was born in 2009 there were only WYSIWYG editors for slides like PowerPoint or OpenOffice Impress or things like Latex Beamer.

There were some HTML/JavaScript based presentation systems like S5, Slideous or DOMSlides which can be used to produce nice slides that can be viewed in every web browser. The problem was that there was no usable editor avialable and you had to write the html code by hand.

The idea of this project was to define the content of your slide in a domain specific and descriptive format and transform it into the respective html format.

One goal was to not only support one of these html presentation systems but to be flexible about the desired framework. For every framework there was a XSLT transformation file that could be exchanged.

The whole process of the transformation was itself described by XML: There was a XProc XML pipeline that defines how the transformation should be done.

The prototype was implemented as Firefox AddOn with XUL and JavaScript.