Re: [Rfc-markdown] Markdown for presentations

[Carsten Bormann <[e-mail]>]

On 2021-07-22, at 08:49, Benson Muite <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> One of the hackathon templates uses Markdown:
> https://github.com/IETF-Hackathon/ietf111-project-presentations
> As the format is very user friendly, it may be something that is useful to consider when creating and modifying markdown related RFCs

Nice.  I started doing something like this in the mid-1980s (before markdown was invented :-), based on troff and a lex-based [101 lines of code] textile-like markup language, inspired by the outliners of the day), and I have been convinced since that this is the right way to create slides for my lectures.

There also have been various HTML-based slide presenters.  In the mid-2000s s5.html was popular; today reveal.js seems to be leading the mindshare in javascript packages for putting up HTML-based slides.

remark [1] [2], as used by the hackathon template, enables the use of markdown inside such an HTML-based deck; the JavaScript slide presenter inside an HTML shell essentially interprets that pasted-in markdown.

Today, many markdown-based tools also include a slide mode.
For instance the markdown-based collaborative editor Hedgedoc (née hackmd and then for a while CodiMD) has a slide mode; this is directly accessible on IETF’s codimd.ietf.org as well.

I personally use a paid Mac-only tool called Deckset (which I cannot recommend to IETFers, but only because of “the illusion of vendor support” [RFC0873]).  It does serve me well, and the markdown ports back and forth great between code, slides, and I-Ds.

The slide deck aspect (new slide, incremental builds, footers, styles) of markdown isn’t really written down, so everyone has their own little markdown extensions, e.g., [3], but these are similar enough and slide decks are usually small enough that a little hand conversion doesn’t hurt too much.

Grüße, Carsten

[1]: https://github.com/gnab/remark
[2]: https://remarkjs.com/
[RFC0873]: Padlipsky, M., "Illusion of vendor support", RFC 873, DOI 10.17487/RFC0873, September 1982, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc873>.
[3]: https://github.com/gnab/remark/wiki/Markdown