web page x4

**handrawn** · 28 March 2008, 08:41 PM

I guess that depends.

Like whether your site is there 'for the passing trade' or not

**remi** · 28 March 2008, 09:49 PM

@all:
It could be only in the interest of all Xara Xtreme users, if constructive criticism leads to a better software.
Please remember that the most important word in our "Moderator decisions & Attractivity of TalkGraphics" thread was "tolerance"! And if there are some users who need a different HTML export, then try to respect their needs.

Remi

**handrawn** · 28 March 2008, 10:21 PM

ok - just so long as it is understood that there is no monopoly on what is, or who defines, a 'proper' website

**ss-kalm** · 29 March 2008, 12:12 AM

The only reason that I prefer nice clean code (as written by the user - not a programme) is "debugging" for want of a better term. If I can read it clearly then I can edit it to make it do what I want. Some sites, you read the source code, and have no idea how the site even runs. Or I do anyway. But there again when I learnt HTML there seemed to be much fewer options.

**raynerj1** · 29 March 2008, 12:52 AM

To the code slingers out there...

You are hopelessly outnumbered. Give up the fight before you are buried in the essence of the WYSIWYG viewpoint.

You might have the power of a tank, but a thousand peasants with broomsticks will still tear you apart. You will not win. I have tried...

You are out numbered by overwhelming odds.

**Charles Moir** · 29 March 2008, 01:34 AM

In order to provide the WYSIWYG and the freedom of put-anything-anywhere-on-the-page requires compromises in the 'cleanliness' of the HTML code. Much of this is due to the age old browser compatibility and platform compatibility issues that have plagued HTML from day one. So this is something that just has to be accepted.

It's pretty clear that there is no universally correct, or pure 'clean' way to produce these effects. But our code does work cross-browser and cross-platform and it is (should be) clean CSS (no tables here) XHTML compatible code. That's a lot more than can be said for a many other HTML creation tools.

I wouldn't go as far as to say that HTML is not designed for WYSIWYG. In fact I'd say it's been a goal the W3C to allow a workable WYSIWYG and cross-browser compatible solution for along time. CSS, layers, absolute positioning, and alpha-channel support, bring huge advances in this respect and are designed for almost exactly what we're doing here. Indeed there is a great fit between our object orientated, layer based, approach to page layout, and that of CSS layer based HTML. And thankfully browsers have grown up, just about, to mean this can now work reliably cross-browser and cross-platform.

But there is a ton of HTML things we can't do. You can't have variable sized pages, dynamic page sizing, scripting, user editable styles, HTML views and a lot more. And for those you have to hack the HTML yourself or use a much more powerful, and much more complex (and probably a lot more expensive) HTML web authoring tool.

But for dead-simple, reliable and compatible, utterly freeform graphical web page design, what we have here has been called revolutionary by more than a few early testers.

**ss-kalm** · 29 March 2008, 01:48 AM

I agree Charles, the HTML website export is nothing short of amazing. As mentioned earlier, export the jpg's as png, and the pages should be almost perfect. Size is not the issue it was 10 years ago where 95% of users were on dial-up. Now I think that less than 10% still use dial-up.

**Tao jones** · 29 March 2008, 07:03 AM

I think it is amazing to charles. I can't wait to knockout a good looking page..t

**w00dy** · 29 March 2008, 08:23 AM

Everyone would love to aspire to making beautiful, CSS, tableless sites with lean, mean code BUT for many of us, it is beyond our capabilities. What it important to not lose sight of is that the are most definitely horses for courses.

I uploaded a single X4 web page made from one of the templates in a couple of minutes, which came out at about 75K and put it up on my projector for my Y10 group who are creating websites. "I made a new site last night...what do you think?". They are thought that it was dead cool... and that I couldn't have done it! A bunch of 15 year olds of mid-range ability were not concerned with how it was achieved, it was simply down to what it looked like.

If say, a restauranteur wanted an attractive 5-6 page site literally ovenight, an X4 job could make him a very happy man. You do not need Dreamweaver and Photoshop for that, nor do you need to be a rocket scientist!

You could achieve similar results with Netobjects Fusion 10 and Serif WebPlus X2, both of which use absolute positioning as X4 and offer a lot more facilities but they are dedicated web design programs. For simple stuff X4 is going to have the edge on creativity as you're not locked into the available template/wizard game.

I could, if I had to, do it all from scratch in code but it would take me infinitely longer given my capablility. At the end of the day, time is money.

The divide between the two camps, WYSIWYG'ers and code-slingers, will always be there but at the end of the day, it's down to what the customer wants... a simple site, a bells and whistles site or a flown blown CMS job.

Addendum: Having played a bit more, you could "extend" things quite easily, http://www.bostoninternet.co.uk/xara4/test.htm . This just pulls another site in (anybody recognise the template!) but it could equally be a web form or editable window. Showed it to a code-slinging designer mate and got the response, "Don't use iframes, SEO don't like them and it all absolute positioning!"... you can't win!

**stlewis** · 29 March 2008, 06:48 PM

Back to my *stretchable* rounded box objective...

A round box as one graphic/Xtreme object is exported as a single img - not stretchable.

I had hoped that if I chopped it into four corners, top, bottom, right and left, Xtreme might work out that the sides can be rendered as a single pixel repeated but that is not so - you end up with eight (plus the centre of the box) imgs, so the only option is in the html/css editing stage.

Still, great for mockups, stage 1 of builds, and for graphic-rich page designs.

One appeal.. mentioned by someone else... can we have the html export to operate only on active layers, please?

[I'm not being churlish in all this - I think the Xara team have done a great job and I do admire the active beta testing/responding that is going on at the moment - thanks from me]