Front-End Libraries for Building Great Presentations

The saying goes that developers should worry less about creating fancy presentations, and actually get on with the things that they want to present to the masses.

I think it’s because there are two types of presentations, there are those that are presented at live talks and gatherings, and then there are those built specifically for learning purposes.

Check it: 7 Web Frameworks for HTML5 Developers

The libraries in this roundup are built specifically for the purpose of creating slides either out of your own previously built webpages, or through bigger pieces of content that you want to present. In any case, it’s worth experiment with these for the sole purpose of grabbing the attention of your readers. Visual learning is always fun.

Slideshow.html

slideshow.html

Here we have a fairly basic implementation of a slideshow/presentation app built within the browser, although once you start to explore the possibilities you get to see how flexible and modern this particular library is. You can browse the demo from within the link above, check the GitHub page for the actual code.

HTML5 Slideshow
Example Slideshow

The previous one was built using Ruby, and also some more advanced web technology, so here we have a more simple approach that utilizes the latest features of HTML5 and CSS3. While this particular library won’t give you access to fancy features such as transitions, it will however all you to create user-friendly slides and get you from one slide to the next, which is what it’s all about.

reveal.js

reveal.js   The HTML Presentation Framework

With nearly 20,000 stars on GitHub – this is definitely one of the leading libraries when it comes to creating flawless and professional slide presentations. The big features for reveal.js is the ability to construct each slide as a slideshow in itself; that includes the ability to slide up and down, and implement all the slide features within a single page. Custom backgrounds, colors, text effects; just the very start of the full feature list.

HTML5 Slides by Google

Title Goes Here Up To Two Lines

Google is also in the “market” for having their own personal slideshow presentation app built with HTML5, for the most part it seems that it has been built and is being used mostly by Google developers themselves for either their IO conferences, or locally, or wherever else they might find use for it. I haven’t seen many people use this particular library a lot, but perhaps everyone thinks it is outdated; when it’s actually being worked on as frequently as necessary.

Slides

HTML Slide Presentation Framework

A very flexible and tiny slideshow presentation framework that was built out of spite of having to use 3rd party, heavy tools. It uses slides in plain HTML, combined with themes, layouts, and slide transitions in CSS, and a small Javascript MVC framework for showing them. You can adjust the colors to your own liking, at which point this should be a pretty good choice for a slideshow library.

CSSS

CSSS  A brief introduction

Lea Verou is the industry guru when it comes to all things CSS, she has worked on some really great projects in the past, and is also part of the team who makes the web standard rules. Recently has moved to MIT to expand her knowledge and understanding of the web technology, and the CSSS project seems like something she did for the sake of being able to do it. Definitely check it out if you want to learn more about how HTML and CSS comes and works together.

deck.js

deck.js » Modern HTML Presentations

A JavaScript library for building modern HTML presentations. deck.js is flexible enough to let advanced CSS and JavaScript authors craft highly customized decks, but also provides templates and themes for the HTML novice to build a standard slideshow. I’d say out all of the libraries we looked at in the list, this one is for the creative minds since you can do so much with it.

Libraries for Building Great Presentations

Look at that, an intense amount of public libraries for building slideshows and presentations of all varieties. There is definitely something for everyone in this list. We sincerely hope you’ll find this of value whenever you need to build a presentation, or perhaps you want to experiment with building some and see how you go!

Let us know if we missed your favorites, clearly when researching this topic I was able to come up with many others, but not many have as unique features as each of these individually.