Simon Willison’s Weblog

OperaShow

3rd November 2002

It’s been a while since I last looked at 30 Days to becoming an Opera Lover so it was a nice surprise to see that not only is the series now complete but Tim has started up blog to continue the momentum. Flicking through the days I hadn’t read before the single feature that impressed me most was OperaShow, described on Day 17. OperaShow is a variant of the full screen mode present in IE and Mozilla, but with the added ability to run PowerPoint style presentations. This is implemented using CSS and the projection media type, in conjunction with the page-break-before : always; CSS property. Opera defaults to rendering the page normally (with whatever screen/all stylesheet the page author has provided) but as soon as you press F11 the projection style sheet comes in to effect. PgDown / PgUp can be used to cycle through the “slides” and the whole thing works just like a PowerPoint presentation.

Further information on OperaShow can be found here:

• Opera.com’s OperaShow Tutorial
• A case study: Converting a powerpoint presentation to OperaShow
• QuickShow for Opera—a shareware application for authoring OperaShow presentations

While playing around with the technology I found the following OperaShow enabled presentations:

• The OperaShow Tutorial
• An OperaShow presentation in XML
• Section 508 and Accessibility for Web Sites

I wonder if Rasmus Lerdorf has considered building OperaShow support in to his PHP Presentation System.