A while back, I needed to create a quick slide-show. I decided to hack it up in HTML – mostly to make it easier to track the diffs in version control and make it easy to distribute. There are many frameworks out there to build sexy HTML based slideshows, but I only had 10 mins to prepare and didn’t want to take the chance of hitting a road block – so I did it myself from scratch. Here’s how…

Step 1: Content (HTML)

Firstly, let’s get some content on the page. In my case, I just had a list of sentences – one per slide. But you could of course do whatever you like here – embed images, bullet lists, etc.

<!DOCTYPE HTML> <html> <head> <title>My slides</title> </head> <body> <section>This is the <em>first</em> slide</section> <section>This is the <em>second</em> slide</section> <section>This is the <em>third</em> slide</section> <section>This is the <em>penultimate</em> slide</section> <section>And this is the <em>final</em> slide</section> </body> </html>

I used the HTML 5 section element, as that is the most semantically relevant tag. And because I’m using HTML 5 tags, I added the HTML 5 DOCTYPE.

Here’s how it looks: Example 1

Step 2: Transitions (JavaScript)

Firstly, a bit of CSS to make each <section> cover the entire page, and hidden when the page loads (imagine a deck of cards, but you can’t see the first one yet).

<style> section { display: none; position: fixed; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; } </style>

Next, a bit of JavaScript at the bottom of the page to find the first section and fade it in when the page loads. I used jQuery because it makes it really easy to express this stuff.

<script> var currentSection = $('section').first().fadeIn(); </script>

This is assigned to a the variable “currentSection” as we want to keep track of which slide we’re on for the transitions.

Now the transition. What I want to say is… “whenever the body is clicked or a key is pressed, fade out the current section, find the next section (which will now be referred to as currentSection), and fade that in”.

With jQuery, that’s:

$('body').bind('click keypress', function() { currentSection = currentSection.fadeOut().next('section').fadeIn(); });

So now we have transitions (click or keypress).

Here’s how it looks: Example 2

Step 3: Prettify (CSS)

Now make it look how you want. Here’s the CSS I used:

<style> body { color: #ffffff; background-color: #000000; font-family: arial; font-size: 40px; -webkit-user-select: none; } section { display: none; position: fixed; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; text-align: center; padding-top: 200px; } em { color: #ffff00; font-family: serif; font-size: 150%; } </style>

That’s all.

See the final result: Example 3

An advantage of building it yourself is you’re in complete control, and can make it do, well, anything.

Oh, and here’s the original slideshow I hacked this up for: 10 reasons why I’m not a cool Java developer (a 5 minute lightning talk at the Google Open Source Jam)