Sell your PowerPoint stocks

Just saw the state of the art in onlin presentaions

http://brian.io/slides/all-your-base-2012/

It's like prezi, but without that Silverlight competitor. What was it? Oh right, flash

Perhaps I'm missing it, but that seems to be done almost entirely with CSS. The HTML is amazingly clean.

The HTML is amazingly clean.

The x86 opcodes of my Win32 binary are amazingly clean too. But I'm not sure why that would be a good thing or not. Surely it's the functionality that matters?

It's full of errors:

http://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1&uri=http%3a%2f%2fbrian.io%2fslides%2fall-your-base-2012%2f

I absolutely loathe this kind of presentation. I have the same problem with Prezi, and people who carelessly use transitions and animations in PowerPoint.

All this will achieve is distraction. Prezi, when used properly, can help to show the structure of your content, but it takes extreme care to do it properly (this particular slide show doesn't do that at all, the zooming and panning doesn't add any value), and even if done well it's still distracting. When I'm presenting I want people to listen to what I'm saying, and having them mesmerized by my slides does not help, no matter how beautiful they might look!

This slide show makes a few other mistakes as well, including being too wordy and having a number of spelling and grammar errors (he consistently leaves out the apostrophe in "let's").

Yeah, I'd walk out of any presentation that tries to create one of those kinetic typography videos rather than clearly presenting information. And while useless as a presentation, the transitions are pretty, but still: this has been available for so long already.

That sort of flashiness is to compensate for substance. The best presentations I've attended were ones that used a PDF with several pages.

2 hours ago, evildictait​or wrote referring to HTML:

*snip*

The x86 opcodes of my Win32 binary are amazingly clean too. But I'm not sure why that would be a good thing or not. Surely it's the functionality that matters?

You know why XAML is a dead end? I expect every developer to understand and write HTML, so no point in learning and knowing two markup languages.

You know why XAML is a dead end? I expect every developer to understand and write HTML, so no point in learning and knowing two markup languages.

Firstly, not all developers are web-developers.

And secondly, the whole point of development is abstraction. Instead of writing HTML, write wrapper classes that write the HTML for you. That way after a while you won't have to write HTML anymore. You just interact with the classes you've written.

In fact, that was one of the key things XAML had going for it - you didn't have to live with the elements you'd been given because you could simply design more and use those in your markup.

That's why I never understood the whole "isn't this HTML lovely" argument. If you've got lovely HTML, it probably means you're still writing it by hand, rather than getting a machine to spit out HTML that you know is conformant, cross-platform, optimised and free from bugs like XSS.

A case in point - go view source on the Google home-page. It's ugly as sin. But you don't hear many people complaining about it.

I'm going to go a bit against the grain here.  While I agree that most transitions take away from the presentation, I consider them good in two ways:

1. Beginning the presentation.  A good set of transitions and animations can grab the audience's attention.
2. Quick fade between slides.  I prefer a quick fade as opposed to a snap; this is only distracting if it's too slow.  (0.25 seconds is good.)

EDIT:  I like them in one more way:  transition between major sections (of which there should be very few).  This gives the audience a better visual cue that the presentation has progressed to the next section.

I don't get it. It's a long page with rounded boxes?

Safari on iPad just crashes out. IE on Surface shows a vertical list of boxes with no transitions. Chrome on Win8 shows a presentation with a style I saw in February or March by Phil Haack. 

Maybe I missed something, but was I supposed to be impressed or something?

@PaoloM: In Chrome, once you get to the last slide by mouse clicking, like most people would expect to do, you have to start using your arrow keys to drill down into the details.

After that it's pretty much all useless transition effects that I've already seen countless times on websites created by freelance web designers trying to impress people.

This cracks me up:

For the best experience please use the latest Chrome, Safari or Firefox browser.

All the stupid transition effects don't work in IE, but it's the "broken" user experience in IE that's not going to make you want to put your fist through the display when trying to view this site.

2 hours ago, evildictait​or wrote

*snip*

Firstly, not all developers are web-developers.

And secondly, the whole point of development is abstraction. Instead of writing HTML, write wrapper classes that write the HTML for you. That way after a while you won't have to write HTML anymore. You just interact with the classes you've written.

In fact, that was one of the key things XAML had going for it - you didn't have to live with the elements you'd been given because you could simply design more and use those in your markup.

That's why I never understood the whole "isn't this HTML lovely" argument. If you've got lovely HTML, it probably means you're still writing it by hand, rather than getting a machine to spit out HTML that you know is conformant, cross-platform, optimised and free from bugs like XSS.

A case in point - go view source on the Google home-page. It's ugly as sin. But you don't hear many people complaining about it.

Damn straight.

2 hours ago, evildictait​or wrote

If you've got lovely HTML, it probably means you're still writing it by hand, rather than getting a machine to spit out HTML that you know is conformant, cross-platform, optimised and free from bugs like XSS.

So lemme get this straight:  HTML was designed to be human readable/writable, with a small performance tradeoff (vs. binary/JIT).  But we humans shouldn't write HTML, and good HTML shouldn't be very readable.

Why are we still using this language?

@bondsbw:

Most commonly HTML is written directly or via a templating language like Haml which pretty strongly maps to HTML.

Actually the "HTML is not scary" thing is one of the biggest shifts in the industry, away from ideas like ASP.NET WebForms or Java Server Faces to MVC-based toolkits and simple template engines.