The Slides Document Type

Norman Walsh

$Id: slides.xml,v 1.2 2002/05/30 12:22:43 nwalsh Exp $


Table of Contents

Choose a Stylesheet
Choose your Parameters
Process the Slides

The Slides Document Type is an XML vocabulary derived from DocBook. It is used to create presentations (slides, foils, whatever you call them) in HTML or print.

Presentations are by nature visual and the Slides stylesheets provide a wide range of options to control how the transformation from XML to HTML is performed.

This document is a first attempt at describing what some of these options are and how to use them.

Choose a Stylesheet

At the highest level, you can choose one of five stylesheets:

  • slides.xsl produces basic slides in HTML, one page per slide.

  • frames.xsl produces slides in HTML using frames.

  • tables.xsl produces slides in HTML using tables, one page per slide.

  • w3c.xsl produces basic slides in HTML, one page per slide, using a navigation style similar to that of most W3C talks.

  • fo-plain.xsl produces basic slides, one page per slide, for print using XSL Formatting Objects.

Choose your Parameters

The parameter reference summarizes the parameters that you can set to change the features of the slides.

Be aware that some features require JavaScript. Some effort has been taken to assure that these features work across different browsers on different platforms, but it is possible that older browsers will not render slides that use JavaScript correctly.

Process the Slides

Run your slides source through your favorite XSLT processor using the stylesheet and parameters you selected.

View the results in your favorite browser.