Creating a slide show system does not have to be as complex and difficult to implement as one might think. Today Meyerweb.com shows us exactly how this be done with minimum headache.

Rather than showing us step by step however, they instead give us two working examples on how S5 can be used to get your pictures online and available for all to enjoy.While they did provide a fair amount of information, I do wish this had been presented in more of a tutorial format.

S5 is a slide show format based entirely on XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript. With one file, you can run a complete slide show and have a printer-friendly version as well. The markup used for the slides is very simple, highly semantic, and completely accessible. Anyone with even a smidgen of familiarity with HTML or XHTML can look at the markup and figure out how to adapt it to their particular needs. Anyone familiar with CSS can create their own slide show theme. It’s totally simple, and it’s totally standards-driven.

As a bonus, its markup is compatible with the Opera Show Format, and S5 is engineered to be displayed using Opera Show when a presenation is run using Opera.

If you’d like to see S5 in action, go ahead and run through the introductory slide show (also available as an 95KB ZIP archive, the size of which is due to the presence of several images in the slide show). Feel free to try any of the features. For example, you can hit the space bar to advance to the next slide. Or use the right arrow, the down arrow, hit Return… any of these will work. The other features will be explained in, or else demonstrated by, the slide show itself.