Well, as I’ve been waiting for and S5 editor to come along, Thumbstack has come along instead and I’ll be content goofing around with that for a while. While Thumbstack isn’t built off of the S5 standard, it is a sold web implementation of presentation software complete with a decent draggable presentation builder…themable to boot! (although the available themes are dumb right now, that’s sure to improve). The editor is a div based-DHTML pumped-Ajax integrated layout; the presentation itself seems to be Flash. Interesting stuff.

It shows promise, but there are a few things it lacks that I hope to see:

• More themes
• Slide transitions and animations (nothing too crazy, basic will do fine)
• Export to Powerpoint
• Ctrl+S to save
• While viewing a presentation, right clicking should give a contextual menu.

I’ll be keeping an eye on Thumbstack. Google recently bought Writely, which means they are interested in web-based Office software. They’ve got Gmail, an upcoming Calendar, a Word Processor, and a Webpage Builder. All they need now are solid presentation and spreadsheet applications. The race is on.

I’ve been screwing around with DOM Manipulation for a few years now, doing stuff sporadically here and there. With my development of MasterWish and my recent interest in Script.aculo.us, I often find myself forgetting the various objects, functions and attributes relating to nodes. Hence the reason for this post. I want a quick and easy way to find the information…So, here’s a quick run-down of node structure:

Assuming we have the following simple structure:

<div id=”outer”>
    <div id=”inner_1″>
        Bork!
    </div>
    <div id=”inner_2″>
        OMG Lazerz Pew pew!1!!!1!
    </div>
    <div id=”inner_3″>
        <div id=”super_inner”>
            I like butter
        </div>
    </div>
</div>

We know the following (I completely understand the relationships between nodes…but I’m filling this out for completeness):

• Node “outer”: is the parent of nodes inner_1, inner_2, and inner_3
• Nodes inner_1, inner_2, and inner_3: are the child nodes of outer
• Node inner_1: is the first child node of outer
• Node inner_3: is the last child node of outer
• Node inner_1: is the previous sibling node of inner_2
• Node inner_3: is the next sibling node of inner_2
• Node super_inner: is not a child node of outer, but is a child node of inner_3

Here are the node related functions available:

Here are the node types: