Mastodawn

Sometimes when I'd give a conference talk I wouldn't be able to get my laptop to work with the conference-supplied projector, and I'd borrow someone else's laptop that did work.

One time this was at OSCON, and it was someone's Windows laptop, and I got a bit of heckling from the audience about this: “you're using Internet Explorer to do your talk at the Open Source Conference?”

I smiled and said “My slides will work on any computer, because they are made in HTML. It's a triumph of open standards.”

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Mark Dominus

The people using Keynote (wholly owned by Apple Computer Inc.) never had to deal with this kind of heckling, I noticed.

I developed the HTML slides after a particularly hair-raising episode: I had been subcontracted to give classes at a large investment bank, and been provided with class materials in the form of a PostScript file. I spent the thirty minutes before the class frantically sneaker-netting a PostScript reader to the 1980s-era classroom computer, and then hand-editing the raw PostScript to keep the reader from displaying the slides upside-down.

After that I said “Never again. Every computer has a browser that can display HTML, so I will do my slides in HTML and display them in the browser.”

This worked perfectly, and had unexpected benefits. If I got to the venue and discovered that the people in the back of the room couldn't read the text, no problem, I'd just hit control-+ a few times and let the browser take care of it.

Using HTML also makes it easy to stick the slides on my web site for the whole world to share and enjoy, whether or not they have Apple™ Keynote™.

I've never regretted it. Slides I wrote in 1994 still work the same, without change or update.

https://perl.plover.com/yak/

Perl Paraphernalia: Classes and Talks

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Simon Tatham 1d ago

@mjd in fairness, PDF makes this pretty reliable too. You can't rely on a Powerpoint slide deck still working if you load it in a supposedly-compatible tool like Libreoffice, but PDFs are harder to get wrong.

When I was job hunting in 1998, I sent out my CV to prospective employers in the form of a .ps.gz file. (Mostly because that was the least horrible format I could get out of TeX.) This turned out to be a pretty nice pre-filter, because employers who replied "err, confused, can you send that again in Word?" flagged themselves as not my kind of people, and enough were left over to find a sensible job. But PDF came in not long after that, and now it would be _deliberate_ obstruction of the recruitment process to send anything less helpful than that. If I sent anyone a .ps.gz these days I couldn't blame them for deciding I was a colossal troll who didn't actually want a job at all.

I think you undersell the _other_ advantage of your HTML strategy compared to PDF, that each viewer can re-scale and re-flow it to their own preferences and screen size: you can have WYSIWYG or you can have accessibility, and more people ought to choose accessibility.

(Also slightly confused that you were inspired to the HTML strategy by trying to get something to work on a 1980s-era machine. Surely that machine would also have been a counterexample to "everything has an HTML viewer"?)

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Mark Dominus 1d ago

@simontatham You must be right. It was probably mid-1990s machine.