I am interested to hear about ways people have found that are good for
creating online slideshows from a few jpgs that look elegant and are
in a documents that validate or nearly validate.
I find that my last big automatic slide show was way back in 2002.
Back then you had to worry more about viewers on dialup than now. Thus
not only did you have to limit the size of jpg or gif files, but many
used pre-loaders with a status bar to avoid the slide show stopping
and restarting on dial-up connections This often was a separate page
that redirected to the main page when pre-loading was complete. I used
a free available pre-load page, but I had to make so many changes to
get it to validate at W3C for xhtml strict that it likely would have
been quicker to write the code from scratch.
The slideshow page proper was mainly JavaScript and css. This
controlled changing of images, resizing of images, positioning on the
page etc. It also validated as xhtml strict. If I used this slideshow
today, I likely would use server side php rather than JavaScript.
There also was a choice of music with 2 buttons to turn it on if
desired. Music formats used were wma and Real, and the quality was not
very good because bandwidth had to be greatly limited because many
viewers used dial-up then. The show worked on IE4 up and Netscape (and
now Firefox ) as well as most modern browsers. Thus the JavaScript had
to have a "document.all" path to handle IE4 as well as the modern
"getElementByID" path that is standard today. I balked at using a
third "layers" path needed for Netscape 4. This page also validated as
xhtml strict and css. You could use a mix of jpg and gif images.
Animated gifs also could be used to provide some motion, but these
seem very crude today since the resolution of them must be very low to
avoid too much bandwidth for dial-up.
Today I likely would use flash for a slideshow. Although many flash
pages do not validate, there is more than one way to write valid flash
code. You can even author a slideshow in the highest resolution HD Blu-
ray video with 96 KHz, 24-bit, 5.1 or 7.1 uncompressed LPCM audio.
However the bit rate becomes so high that it is far too much for the
web.