[uf-new] Microformats for Slide Show/Presentations - hShow, hSlide - State-of-the-Art?

[Drew McLellan]

On 12 Mar 2008, at 21:01, Gerald Bauer wrote:

> Hello,
>
>   Thanks for your thoughts.
>
>> My question would be why is a microformat needed?
>
>   Simply to interoperate and make authoring tools and projection
> tools work together because they can rely on a common microformat.
>
>> It strikes me that the mechanics of a slideshow presentation itself  
>> is
>> a different thing entirely to the content being presented.
>>
>> Whilst it's valid to say "this content is an event" or "this content
>> is a about xyz" as these describe the meaning of the content, saying
>> "this content is in a slideshow" is telling us about the medium, not
>> the content.
>>
>> Would you agree?
>
>  How is this different from hAtom or hSlice? hAtom saying "this
> content is a web feed" and hSlice saying "this content is a web
> slice". Am I missing something? Any insight appreciated.

hAtom is describing a list of time-related items, and within each item  
describing the timestamp, description, summary and all the component  
parts that make up that item. It's adding extra information about the  
relationships between the discreet data points that enables us to  
understand them more fully. What it's not describing is how that is  
data is treated with regard to presentation.

(I've not heard of hSlice, and so don't have an opinion on that.)

The crucial point being that if I mark something up as a heading, it's  
because it is a heading in the context of the document, and no  
treatment of the document will change that. By saying something is a  
slide, does that make it so? What is the intrinsic nature of a slide?  
Is there anything I could do to it that makes it no longer a slide?  
What if I print it on large paper - does it then become a poster?

Feel free to disagree, of course, but I think a slide is a  
presentation medium for content, and not content itself.


drew.