Front-end developers often end up as the unofficial "slides person" on a team. We can build a beautiful deck with HTML and CSS in an hour, but the request that follows is almost always the same: "Please send it as PowerPoint." These are my notes on handling that request efficiently, from the perspective of someone who cares about clean markup.

Background: why HTML decks keep appearing

Three trends push presentations toward HTML:

AI generation. Large language models output HTML and CSS reliably. Ask for slides and you get a single .html file.

Frameworks. Reveal.js, Slidev, Marp and similar tools let developers write slides in Markdown and render them as web pages.

Design systems. Teams want slides to match the product's own components, colours and typography.

All three produce web pages, not PowerPoint files.

The core technical mismatch

PowerPoint's OOXML format positions elements absolutely on a fixed canvas. Browsers lay out content with flow, flexbox, grid and fonts that load asynchronously.…