If you grok the DOM (Document Object Model), you can roll your own features pretty easily. I added a table of links, for example, by writing a JavaScript function that scans the document for external URLs and attaches a list of them to the last slide. That's more than a tad geeky, I'll admit, but I'm hardly the only user who can, and will, extend Slidy.

Nothing evolves in a vacuum, of course. Along with OperaShow, Dave Raggett acknowledges the influence of Eric Meyer's S5 (http://www.infoworld.com/4145). Using Web technology for presentations is hardly a novel idea. But now that the AJAX juggernaut is rolling, old projects are sparking new interest and spawning new offspring. According to Raggett, future plans for Slidy include a mechanism for remotely controlling distributed instances of a slideshow, using the browser's XMLHttpRequest object to listen for navigation commands.

Bring it on! Presentation software has been stuck in neutral forever. Web applications, however, are firing on all cylinders. Some say Word and Excel are about to be Web 2.0 roadkill. Not me. The browser can't yet substitute for those applications. But for PowerPoint? Any day now.