Using Markdown for presentations seems like we're going in the wrong direction, if anything?
Presentations should have as little text as possible, but Markdown is a text-first markup language. I feel like if I used Markdown, I would end up putting way too much text on the screen because it's what's most convenient.
Boy, if only you saw how popular Beamer (a LaTeX presentation framework) was in certain academic circles. Spoiler: it leads to exactly the problem you describe, in addition to using some default styling that manages to be both hideous and crushingly bland at the same time. At least, based on the screenshots, this proposed framework doesn't have the second problem.
I guess, the way I view this is as a "better beamer" (which isn't saying much IMO) rather than a better powerpoint. Basically, it's a way for people who were going to make a text-heavy presentation anyway to produce something that looks OK, and to avoid using a heavyweight tool like LaTeX.
Markdown doesn't encourage or discourage text volume per slide. that's entirely the human. I mean sure, there's nothing stopping you from putting the full Illiad per slide but... again, that's you not the markdown.
you could just as easily paste or type paragraphs worth of text per slide in GUI presentation tools.
It's more a problem of not thinking about the volume you're putting on a slide or not using a tool that gives you good visual feedback like a GUI app does as you add text.
I've been using Deckset https://www.deckset.com/ for years and tend to have very little text per screen.
Having used many different tools to create presentations, including sozi, and jessyink (svg to presentation tools using inkscape), Markdown tools (reveal, sli.dev, reveal via org mode) and power point, I actually find that using Markdown tools typically leads to less text in slides (I know this is counterintuitive). You essentially often end up with a single statement/single image type slides that one often sees in "inspirational" type presentation (e.g. Ted talks.
There in also lies an issue with Markdown presentations, more complex layouts (e.g. a side by side comparison) often require tweaking css/html and are more inconsistent. Unfortunately I find it very hard to avoid layouts like these for deeply technical content.
I agree. Graphical animations (even to highlight text, tables, figures) is such an essential part of communicating in a slide show, and I have not found a tool that achieves both separation of content and style while allowing convenient design of these graphical elements.
I agree, but lots of folks are making presentations of this style because it's expected of them and they don't have the power to rock the boat, like the sibling comment about Beamer. Those folks still deserve good tools.
History and momentum is part of it, but the other part is the value of the slides when viewed later. There's an inverse correlation between the usefulness of slides and the quality of the presentation!
Best I've seen is low-text Google slides with heavy speaker notes included, but that's more work and prep than most people are willing to do (myself included).
Presentations should have as little text as possible, but Markdown is a text-first markup language. I feel like if I used Markdown, I would end up putting way too much text on the screen because it's what's most convenient.