S5 (file format)

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S5 stands for Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System and is an XHTML-based file format for defining slideshows. It was created by Eric A. Meyer as an alternative to the browser-centric Opera Show Format. S5 is not a presentation program, but fulfills the same purpose in combination with a standards-compliant web browser. The text of an S5 presentation can be stored in a single XHTML file. This file contains several slides which are coded in the following way.

<div class="slide">
 <h1>slide title</h1>
 <ul>
   <li>the first point</li>
   <li>the second point</li>
   <li>the third point</li>
 </ul>
 <div class="handout">
  ... additional material that appears
     on the handout
 </div>
</div>

S5 presentations can be viewed in outline and slideshow mode - Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are used to define different layouts for outline, slideshow and print. Navigation controls, a dynamically generated list of slides and accesskeys allow browsing back and forth.

A more semantic version of the S5 format is based on the XOXO microformat and uses <li class="slide"> instead of divs for the slides, as well as <ol class="xoxo presentation"> instead of a div for the overall presentation.

On July 28th, 2005, the S5 format and software was placed in the Public Domain by Eric Meyer.

On September 7, 2005, Carsten Borman released S6, a "synchronized S5" for coordinated display of an S5 slideshow to a number of different users.

On July 17th, 2006, Ryan King launched s5project.org, "a new community site, dedicated to the S5 Presentation software".

In December 2006, Christian Effenberger launched S5 Reloaded, an extended version of S5 (autorun, scalable images, sound support, transition effects, new themes etc.).