slides: how to balance presentation and content

[Stefan Seefeld <seefeld@sympatico.ca>]

Hello,

I have recently spent some time preparing a presentation using 
docbook-slides. While I was happy to be able to reuse chunks of content 
from other docbook content (article material, mostly), I also found it 
quite hard to work inside the docbook realm on this.
My slides contained a considerable amount of non-textual content, such 
as MathML formula as well as SVG graphics. So I spent a lot of time 
fine-tuning the presentation, i.e. changing the docbook markup and 
tuning the (CSS) stylesheet in parallel, to get what I wanted. Still, 
the results weren't perfect.

So I wonder: what experience do others have with docbook-slides ? While 
I understand the importance to separate content from presentation, I 
believe for a domain such as slides, this distinction doesn't work quite 
as well as it does for articles or books.
Are there plans for providing a slides document model based on DB 5 ? 
Will there be more support for presentational markup than there is in 
the current version ?

(I'd be happy to help work on the finer details, i.e. make suggestions 
as to how that could be done.)

For the record, I have been using S5 
(http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/) and worked with a custom stylesheet 
to target that from docbook-slides. That took some hacks, as S5 allows 
some neat tricks (incremental lists, overlayed images, etc.) that 
require some additional markup not provided by docbook. In fact, I 
mostly (ab-)used the 'role' attribute, though I believe there have to be 
better and more expressive ways to indicate the expected presentational 
info.

Thanks,
       Stefan

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