Re: some thoughts for (future) tidy "slides" features

On Thu, 17 Oct 2002 joshie@amish-pride.com wrote:

> i love the slides feature, and use it almost daily. however, after
> almost always modifying the html output, i have a list of features
> that i would be interested in, and you mention on the site that
> you would be interested in hearing about ideas for features.

Thanks for the encouragement. It turns out that relatively few 
people have been using the slides feature, and as a result it has
recently been moved out of the core Tidy sources. Tidy has now been 
reformulated as a library, and it would be easy enough to integrate
that with the code for the slide generation, as a separate tool.

Going forward a few years, my ambition is to evolve CSS to the point
that it won't be necessary to split a presentation into separate
files for each slide. Instead, you will be able to define a
presentation style sheet that presents one slide at a time, along
with any build and page transition effects you indicate. The Opera
browser already supports the CSS @media presentation feature and we
expect others to follow. Further work is needed in the W3C to reach
a consensus on how to adapt CSS for build and page transition
effects, although we do have some initial proposals to start from.

> first, a way to change the default filename from slide#.html to
> whatever#.html, such as page (something i would have liked before
> renaming all 33 chapters of my book, and greping the files so the
> links didnt break)

That would be easy enough.

> it would be cool if by setting an <li> (or whatever) to a certain
> class (say "slide") you could get it to slide onto the screen thru
> dhtml, such as that by dreamweaver (only using GOOD code to make
> it work! dreamweaver code sux--$300 and it writes code that i
> would be embarrased to have on my site... i will never own it and
> only use it because collage makes me)

If you have developed some good script snippets for this, that would
be interesting, although, in the long term, I hope this would be
replaced by CSS as I mentioned above.

> another neat idea would be to allow each click to do certain
> things, such as the first click in the <div> would make the first
> bullet appear, the second make the second appear, ets, and when
> they all showed up then go to the next slide. i often recode the
> slides to do this myself, but it would be neat built in.

Yup!

> also, perhaps a template file for the slides? i know that you can
> use a style @import command in the main page that winds up in all
> of them, but control over the entire slideshow (maybe to add a
> navbar--quickie site building!) would be cool. maybe an external
> file with includes-type comments where various stuff goes...
> 
> maybe a table of contents function? that names each slide after
> its <h2> and links to it? accessable with the links.

That sounds good.

> and (final idea) the use of <link> tags, as icab and opera for mac
> support them, for prev, next, and the such, or at least an
> includes-type way to access the previous,next, and first slides.

Would you be willing to help with the maintenance of the slide 
generation code?  Work on Tidy has now moved to SourceForge and
volunteers are very much welcomed, see:

    http://tidy.sourceforge.net/

Best wishes,
-- 
 Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org> or <dave.raggett@openwave.com>
 W3C lead for voice/multimodal. http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett 
 tel/fax: +44 1225 866240 (or 867351) +44 771 213 7629 (GSM)

Received on Friday, 18 October 2002 07:02:31 UTC