Overview slides

Introduction

The Office slide sets cover a decent portion of the activities of W3C. Each set is between 5 and 50 slides depending on the topic. However, the slide set is under constant development, and not all the topics are covered at the same depth.

The main goal of this slide set is to help the office staff (or anybody else, by the way) to give a presentation of W3C activities with or without going into the very details of a particular recommendation or activity area. Everyone is, of course, free to take the slideset as a basis only, and modify it for a specific presentation following his/her own taste and style. There is nothing cast in concrete here.

This is an evolving slide set. Some of the slide sets are very detailed, while some others are more terse. The overall goal is not to provide very detailed presentations; the experience is that office staff speakers are generally requested at events that want an overall view. If real “tutorial” like talks are asked for, then it is better to rely on a relevant expert of the W3C team. Of course, if a specific area is in the experience of an office staff or myself (eg, SVG), then we can also add a more tutorial like presentation. Any contribution is welcome from anybody, either in the forms of updates or complete slide sets! (I am sure there are also mistakes here and there).

You are of course free to download and use as you wish the "all.html" file in each of the subdirectories.

History and immediate plans

The slide set used to be larger, but I pruned it a bit. I deleted those that are not really for our general public (eg, introduction to XML, HTTP). These may be relevant for, eg, university courses, but this is not our goal.

I also added some more "overview" type presentation, like the renewed "Overview", the "SemanticWeb", etc. I plan to do something similar for Interaction formats, Device Independence and Multimodality, and some others.

I have not updated the slide set on SMIL, for example. Mainly for the latter there is a technical difficulty, too, in developing sets that are presentable on a large enough palette of browsers (due to requirements of plugins, for example).

Some activities have a fairly good set of slides, presentations, etc, that cover the current state of what they do. It seems to be useless to repeat those. WAI or I18N are typical cases; there are also excellent talks on XHTML and XForms (mostly by Steven Pemberton), it seems again silly to repeat those here. Instead, I made a direct link to those in the table below.

General structure

There has been all kinds of slide generation tools in the past; it is unnecessaryto go into all the details here, it has only a historical value. The slideset is currently being converted (with some exceptions, see below) to the Slidy tool of W3C. This tool is indeed the best candidate these days to become some sort of a unified presentation platform for W3C. It is based on a javascript engine and relies on a specific structure of the input XHTML file to display the content. See the description for details.

The slides in this set are slightly more complicated, though, due to the presence of SVG. In an ideal World, one could use the object element of XHTML to refer to SVG and have the child element of the element to refer to an alternative (typically jpeg or png) image. That means that the file can be displayed using SVG (if the browser can display SVG) or, alternatively, the image if it cannot. Unfortunately, this mechanism does not work properly on IE6 for some types of SVG files (essentially, if an SVG file has an external, relative reference to another file, it breaks down).

To alleviate this problem, the directories of the set typically contain the following three files:

1. An Overview.html file, to be used with slidy; this file does not refer to an SVG content, but to an image only. Ie, it can be used safely with all browsers.
2. An OverviewWithSVG.html file, with the similar content, but referring to SVG using the mechanism described above, with an alternative image. This can be used, for example, if you use Firefox or Opera with the Adobe SVG plugin. In some cases, you should use the ASVG6 version of the plugin, there might be some SVG content that does not work properly with ASVG3.
3. An all.html that is used to generate the other two. I use a python based generation tool to generate the files (there usually a Makefile in the directory, you can have a look at that how exactly one should call the script).

The reason I use the generation tool is convencience. Besides the fact that it generates the two “Overview” versions automatically, it offers some other tricks that come in handy (eg, to refer to the slides of another presentation when there are overlaps). If you do not care about these, you can safely ignore and use, for example, Overview.html file and forget about SVG and the other difficulties.

However, the apperance of Firefox 1.5, with its SVG facilities, made this structure a bit unnecessary. So, for some sets, we get back to the simplest situation with only one Overview file, using the <object> mechanism to include SVG plus possibly a graphics as an alternative, and with the SVG content tested on Firefox1.5. That should be the future for all presentations... Those sets are marked as Slidy+FF1.5 in the table below. [Note: the files may also refer to style files and images in /StyleSheets]

(One more remark on SVG when using Opera8. Opera8 implements SVG Tiny. However, that also means that if the SVG content is more than Tiny, then Opera8 goes wrong because (1) it cannot interpret the content but (2) it tries to do it and does not relinquish control to the Adobe plugin... Fortunately, the SVG Tiny feature can be switched off: you should go to advanced options, downloads, unclidk the remark “Hide file types opened with Opera”, choose SVG and SVGZ and edit the panel accordingly. Note that the slides marked as Slidy+FF1.5 may work properly with Opera, too, but you should test it to be sure...)

Content

The main presentations are:

Some directories contain various auxiliary files, these are:

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