PresML Documentation

The Presentation Markup Language (PresML) is a a specialized XML-based HTML-like markup language specialized for efficient creation of "slide shows" to be displayed with a Web browser. The presentation is created by making one text file that describes the structure and content of the presentation. Simply type out your presentation following the instructions below, and drop the file onto WebSlides to convert it into a sequence of HTML documents that can be viewed by a Web browser.

You are welcome to check out the example of a presentation created with WebSlides. Here is the content of the text-file that this example is created from:


<PRESENTATION TITLE="Using WebSlides">

<ICON><IMG SRC="/graphics/webslides.gif" /></ICON>


Terje Norderhaug<BR>

terje@in-progress.com<BR>

<A HREF="http://www.in-progress.com/people/terje">http://www.in-progress.com/people/terje<A>

<SLIDE TITLE="What is PresML?">
<UL>
<LI>Tool to efficiently create presentations</LI>
<LI>Presentations can be displayed with a web browser</LI>
<LI>Specialized markup language</LI>
<LI>PresML Lite does not require markup</LI>
</UL>
</SLIDE>

<SLIDE TITLE="Why use WebSlides?">
PresML is Efficient, Easy, and Fast.
</SLIDE>

<SLIDE TITLE="Overview of Available Tools">
<OL>
<LI>PresML converter for Mac</LI>
<LI>PresML converter as Perl script</LI>
<LI>PresML documentation</LI>
<LI>PresML Lite documentation</LI>
</OL>
</SLIDE> </PRESENTATION>

The converter uses markup as above to identify the different elements of the presentation and its pages. This is how it works:

The presentation is enclosed in an <PRESENTATION> container.
The title of the presentation is enclosed in a <TITLE> container and placed in the beginning of the document.
An optional icon is enclosed in an <ICON> container and placed in the first part of the document, typically written out as an HTML image: <IMG SRC=...>. The icon is used as part of the header of each slide and will also work as a next-button.
The frontpage that opens the presentation is written out using HTML body markup. Here you typically introduce yourself as the presenter.
Each slide in the presentation is enclosed in a SLIDE container, with an optional endtag.
The header of each slide is written as a TITLE attribute to the SLIDE tag.
The content of each page can be any HTML body elements
You are advised to use the PresML <H> header tag instead of the various HTML header tags for subheaders on each slide.

You are welcome to use a copy of this example to test out how it works. Just save it in a file, and open this file from the PresML converter to create the HTML files. Then open the first file with a web browser. Adjust the size of the characters of the browser to match the needs of your presentation. Thats it!

WebSlides support Cascading Style Sheets. Simply place the style sheet in a STYLE element in the top of the presentation just like you would in an HTML document, and WebSlides will take care of adding the styles to all slides.

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