Xtreme's html export facility

[philt]

I've worked through Gary's helpful tutorial and have played around a bit exporting pages from one or two of the html templates. Interesting, and I can see how this approach might be useful. But the source code Xara produces is awfully dense and looks like it would be hard to maintain 'by hand'.

Seems to me either you'd have to stick with the WYSIWYG approach or else put in a lot of tedious labour cleaning up the code so that you could work with it. I suppose you could use the html export thing to produce a very bare-bones skeleton--just to sketch out the layout--but otherwise I'm about to conclude that it won't be of much use to me.

I'm curious to know what others think about this.

[BobInce]

Yes, it's an HTML filter hidden away as one format on the Export dialogue. Just as with any other export filter, it tries to do the best it can to translate visual objects as Xtreme sees them into the limitations of the target format. It does not claim to produce an optimal or beautiful file in HTML or any of the other formats.

If you can hand-code HTML and use Xtreme to create the images for it, you're best off sticking with that workflow, as the results will be better than Xtreme or any WYSIWYG drawing tool could generate by itself.

[Soquili]

Hi Phil,

I think the HTML export is more for creating a functioning layout and not for website maintenance. As you pointed out hand editing the code would be more difficult than if you created the page initially by hand.

People have used static images for web page layouts. The HTML export allows them to see a functioning web page with their graphic layout.

[ss-kalm]

Xara's code is not designed to be edited. If you want to edit the page, edit the drawing and re-export the whole thing. I know some people have edited it to add flash etc. but that was not the original intention. It's supposed to produce a fully functional web page that matches the drawn pages. And it's very good at it. (Now to open a can of worms....) Why would you need to maintain it?

[philt]

Thanks to all who have commented. Interestingly, Keith asks 'why would you need to maintain it?'. Hmm. I suppose if it's my own personal site that I've built with Xtreme there wouldn't be much of a problem. But say the site is for some third party; someone else is going to maintain it? Then it's no good I think.

I can see some limited use for this, but beyond that--not sure at all. I'll continue to play around with it. I did notice that if you run the exported source through Tidy it cleans it up a bit.

[ss-kalm]

Agreed - If someone else is to maintain it, it's not exactly ideal. If you're doing your own upgrades, it works quite well. (Obviously by maintain, I was only referring to editing the HTML rather than re-uploading)

[snicho]

I'm just finishing off my first site built using XXP. To date, I have authored previous web sites at a purely html level.

In this instance, my task was to just give an updated look and feel to a tired old site, keeping most of the existing content, tidying it up somewhat with new owner specified colours, etc. Using XXP, the site came together very quickly (which is also good given that this job was a freebie (why do I do this again? ))

However, the concept of being able to maintain the content is also important in this instance - and I won't be the person to provide ongoing maitenance for it - the owner wants to be able to update their own "news" page, etc.

To address this, I have got to a point where the layout, menu, etc, are all agreed as finalised with the site owner, then I have edited the couple of pages that will change regularly (eg. "news of the day/week", etc) so that they are using iframe elements. ie. I copied the text content to a separate news.html page and re-inserted it back into the main page using an iframe tag.

This may not be "ideal" or the "best web page coding practice", but it works in this instance with this site owner. They can edit the text on the dynamic pages in any editor they want, even online if need be (courtesy of an online editor supplied by their ISP), and the overall structure of the website remains intact because they are only changing the inserted pages.

-steve