Web Properties

As mentioned in the previous subclause, these properties configure the output of the presentation when saved using the HTML or MHTML formats. In this case, a number of parameters can be controlled.

In all multi-slide cases where the presentation is saved using one of these formats, the implementation will create a frameset to bring the various parts of a presentation—the slide content, the speaker notes and the outline—together as well as provide for simple navigation. The color of the HTML frames, the background used and the user interface controls can be controlled to leverage browser settings, use high contrast, etc.

The author can also control how much interactivity will be exposed in the resulting output. For example, the user may elect to disable slide animations and transitions and opt for a more static presentation. Similarly, the author may elect to disable certain scripting features like the ability to resize dynamically the output to match the size of the browser window.

Somewhat related to this is the ability to specify the target screen size which is especially important when targeting the earlier browser generations or user environments where features like JavaScript are disabled.

For an internationalized implementation, there is the ability to control the encoding of text used in the generation of the HTML or MHTML output.

Finally there are a set of parameters that configure the on-disk storage of the resulting output. For example, if the customer knows something about the machine configurations of her audience, she can opt to use better raster graphic formats like PNG that support alpha transparency or elect to include Vector Markup Language (“VML”) representations only for vector images.

The customer can also provide some indication as to how the output will be used. If the customer knows that the output will be used like regular files (perhaps passed around on CDs or moved between file shares) the user may elect to store the files in a folder to ensure that a straggling file is not lost; if, however, the target scenario is to put the files on a web server, the user can skip the folder and save the individual files in a flat directory. Similarly, if the customer knows that they are using a web server that only handles “8.3” file names, they can configure the implementation to generate files using names that are “8.3” compliant, as opposed to using long file names that may otherwise cause such web servers problems.