PowerPoint pretty much sucks, for a variety of reasons. And in that group I also include OpenOffice.org Impress (which I personally choose to suffer through) and Apple's Keynote. They all just suck in different ways. Being a Web dude, I've always looked for a web-based solution, and now there appears to be two contenders: Dave Raggett's Slidy (he's the guy who invented the awesome Tidy, so you know he's a smart cookie) and Eric Meyer's (we all must bow to him & his CSS godly knowledge) S5, which stands for Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System.

Both are good, & both work the same: they provide you with the CSS files (which you can customize ... & which you should customize, so your templates are unique) and JavaScript, & your job is put your entire presentation in an XHTML file. If you know HTML, this will be easy; if you don't ... well, there's always Impress! Based on my experimentation with both, I'm going to use S5. It supports font scaling a bit better, & it has some features that Slidy doesn't have, especially in the footer that's auto-generated on every slide. On top of that, Eric Meyer, showing his background as a writer, has better documentation that Dave Raggett, which is key. But in either case, both Slidy & S5 are worth exploring, & it's great news that we finally have an alternative to PowerPoint and the other presentation clients.

(Check out all of our posts on presentations, OpenOffice.org, S5, and Eric Meyer.)

As most of you should know, OpenOffice.org's file formats are based on ODF, the Open Document Format. Microsoft claims that its new Office file formats, MSXML, are just as good if not better. The always-excellent Groklaw provides an article titled "Format comparison between ODF and MS XML" that looks at both. It really opened my eyes and helped me understand the differences. If you want to know more about these two formats - which are going to both come into wide usage in the future - then read this article. It's really, really interesting ... trust me! It is!

(Check out all of our posts on OpenOffice.org.)