I recently looked into some options for building a slideshow presentation for display in the browser. While there are options like SlideShare and Speaker Deck that let you upload your slides in PowerPoint or PDF format to convert them to online slides, there are also a ton of options for libraries, toolkits, and APIs that let you create your own non-Flash, full screen, responsive presentations.

Usually these presentations are HTML5-based, use JavaScript and/or jQuery, and often require a modern browser. But some of them are simpler and offer deeper browser support. Here’s a list of all of the ones I’ve been able to find, with a brief description of each.

I haven’t used any of these, and don’t know much about them at all, but I thought it would list them here (in no particular order) for future reference for anyone looking into this sort of thing.

Fathom.js

Fathom.js | Fathom.js on GitHub

“Write your slideshow in HTML, style it with CSS and control it with some jQuery-powered JavaScript. When you’re done, Fathom.js even lets you sync the video of your presentation quickly and easily. Fathom.js comes with mouse, keyboard and scroll bar navigation built in and provides a simple API for creating your own custom interfaces.”

CSS-based Slideshow System (CSSS)

CSS-based Slideshow System | CSSS on GitHub

“A simple framework for building presentations with modern web standards.”

impress.js

impress.js | impress.js on GitHub

“Don’t you think that presentations given in modern browsers shouldn’t copy the limits of ‘classic’ slide decks? Would you like to impress your audience with stunning visualization of your talk? It’s a presentation tool inspired by the idea behind prezi.com and based on the power of CSS3 transforms and transitions in modern browsers.”

reveal.js

reveal.js | reveal.js on GitHub

“reveal.js is an easy to use, HTML based, presentation tool. You’ll need a modern browser with support for CSS 3D transforms to see it in its full glory.”

3D-Cube-Slideshow

3D-Cube-Slideshow on GitHub

“A presentation deck utilizing 3D CSS transforms and transitions to navigate between slides. Content is a presentation on JavaScript code quality.”

Slidedown

Slidedown | Slidedown on GitHub

“Generate syntax-highlighted slides from Markdown.”

DZSlides

DZSlides | DZSlides on GitHub

“DZSlides is a one-page-template to build your presentation in HTML5 and CSS3.”

deck.js

deck.js | deck.js on GitHub

“A JavaScript library for building modern HTML presentations. deck.js is flexible enough to let advanced CSS and JavaScript authors craft highly customized decks, but also provides templates and themes for the HTML novice to build a standard slideshow.”

html5slides

html5slides on Google Code | html5slides Demo

“A Google HTML5 slide template.”

Slippy

Slippy | Slippy on GitHub

HTML slides with syntax highlighting, incremental slides, and more.

HTML Slidy

HTML Slidy

“Slide Shows in HTML and XHTML.”

Scrolldeck

Scrolldeck | Scrolldeck on GitHub

“A jQuery plugin for making scrolling presentation decks” with animations, full screen images, and parallaxing.

S5

S5 | S5 Article

This is an older slideshow tool by Eric Meyer. “S5 is a slide show format based entirely on XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript. With one file, you can run a complete slide show and have a printer-friendly version as well.”

Shower

Shower | Shower on GitHub

“Сross-browser HTML presentation template.”

Shining

Shining | Shining on GitHub

“Awesome presentations in HTML + JS + CSS.”

Luminescence

Luminescence | Luminescence on Google Code

“Awesome presentations in HTML + JS + CSS.”

Squeenote

Squeenote | Squeenote on GitHub

“A way for nerds to present to other nerds.”

Landslide

Landslide | Landslide on GitHub

“Generates a slideshow using the slides that power the html5-slides presentation.”

POW

POW | POW on GitHub

“An experimental HTML5 presentation tool. Create simple, powerful presentations using just HTML and JavaScript.”

Slides

Slides | Slides on GitHub

“I got fed up with using Keynote and Powerpoint to create and give presentations. I’m a web developer for pete’s sake, can’t I do it in HTML?”

jmpress.js

jmpress.js | jmpress.js on GitHub

Not exactly just for presentations, but very cool. “A jQuery plugin to build a website on the infinite canvas.”

Any Others?

I’d like this list to be exhaustive. If you know of any other tools for creating HTML-based presentations, please comment and I’ll add them. And if anyone owns one of these and wants to provide a quick summary of features, I’ll be happy to add your summary to the description.