Presentation Software - Why is it so difficult?

After my WinXP laptop hard disk melted down this summer, I never got around to reinstalling MS Office on it. Most of my needs for editing can be met with a plain text editor (I use the freeware Crimson Editor on Windows), and I seldom actually need to use spreadsheets when I'm not at my office desk.

But I do have to create and give presentations, and I've been struggling with the best approaches. It seems to me that there ought to be an easy way to create standards-compliant html presentations, but I'll be darned if I've found it. I've created html presentations by hand editing them, but that's rather a pain.

The save-to-html in PowerPoint has actually gotten worse since Office 98 - it really wants to make presentations that only work in IE, and it seems impossible to get presentations on the web looking like I want.

Last week I downloaded and installed Open Office and was delighted to see an export to html option on the File menu in the Presentation software. But using proved another disappointment: it created two versions of my presentation, one which converted all of the slides into images, including the text, and one which contained nothing but text, rendering none of the images.

If anybody has any good html-based presentation authoring tools, please let me know!