Back from Detroit and leaving for Boston, where I’ll help some old friends put on a show. See some of you there!
Although my talk in Boston has nothing to do with web standards, I’m using them to format my “slide show.” Specifically, I’m using Eric “Godfather of CSS Design” Meyer’s Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System to turn one page of XHTML into three dozen virtual “slides,” complete with Back and Next buttons and a self-generating dropdown menu that lets me skip to any “slide.”
The cool thing about turning one page into 36 “slides” is that I can change the sequence at any time. It beats managing 36 individual HTML pages. And because CSS drives the presentation, I was able to quickly give it my company’s look and feel by editing a file.
Eric’s system is free for anyone’s use, and for what it’s worth I’ve found it very easy to understand and work with.
It’s worth adding that in June of this year, A List Apart published a similar contraption – Christian Heilmann’s Dynamically Conjuring Drop-down Navigation – and the two free tools have many similarities. Even the way Christian and Eric write their JavaScript is somewhat similar. But Eric had not seen Christian’s Dynamic Drop-down tool when he wrote his, and although the two are interestingly similar in some ways, they are also different.
And now I have a train to catch. Talk to you next week.