Dear Xara (people from Xara really do actually read this, right?),

I know this has been brought-up and whined about before, but, seriously, folks...

...it really is time, at long last, for Xara Web Designer (and the web design capabilities of Designer Pro) to be able to easily (and that's the operative word, here: easily) accommodate the integration of a true content management system (CMS), or a blog or shopping cart which similarly integrates.

Yes, I know about the tweak which allows for dynamic page sizing, but that's a really crude and tedious workaround. Don't get me wrong: The guy who wrote it did a great job...

...but he really shouldn't have had to. CMSs (and CMS-similar -- in terms of integration technique -- blogs and shopping carts) are no longer curiosities or optional. No serious (and that's the operative word: serious) web designer can get through a week, anymore, without the client asking if s/he can make content (as opposed to design) updates himself or herself, without engaging the services of the designer (likely for a fee).

And this is not a new thing. I mean... c'mon... CMSs (and CMS-similar blogs and shopping carts) have been around a long time, now; they've become commonplace. No one who's doing serious web sites for clients which are more than just multipage electronic brochures, in effect, is able to seriously use Xara's web design products because there's no easy way to code the page so that it dynamically resizes, vertically, to accommodate whatever variable-sized content is put onto the page via the CMS (or blog or shopping cart).

There are also issues with easily embedding the CMS's code into Xara's finished HTML, but that problem at least feels conquerable somehow compared with the problem of not easily being able to allow pages to dynamically vertically resize, based on content.

While it may not have been true back during version 5 days, it is absolutely and incontrovertibly true now that no WYSIWYG HTML editor which cannot accommodate vertically dynamically resizable pages (so that pages will vertically resize based on CMS-inserted (or blog or cart inserted) content) is ultimately useful...

...not matter how cool are all its other features.

I realize it's all about Xara's accurate-to-the-pixel placement of things on the page; but something, somehow, has got to change. It just has to. It's finally time. It really is.

First, there needs to be some kind of easy configuration setting whereby the vertical length of the page will dynamically resize based on whatever content is in it; and, second, there needs to be an easy way to insert (maybe through a dialog or something) the tags/codes which tell the CMS (or blog, or cart) where to display its content on the page.

If Xara's products would do that, on top of what they already do, they would, indeed, be a force with which to be reckoned among WYSIWYG web design products.

Of course, no matter what, as long as Xara generates the kind of code that it does, with all the extra coding that it needs to place things just so, HTML purists will always hate it; and will cite it as one of the worst examples of the kind of typically bloated and unnecessarily complex code which WYSIWYG editors tend to generate. Xara will never make those guys happy.

But that's okay. As long as the site looks good, and gets the job done, and does okay in search engines, and is fast-painting on the screen, the client doesn't care. And neither should the designer. To heck with those guys, on that score.

But the inability of easily inserting the code necessary to accommodate CMSs (and blogs and carts which are technically, in terms of how they're coded into the page, CMS-like) is fast becoming a deal breaker. It really is.

I hope -- nay, pray -- that Xara will take this problem VERY seriously; and will come out with a version 7.5 or 8.0 which finally, at long last, will easily allow the two things which pretty much all the CMSs need, and that's pages which dynamically vertically resize, based on the amount of content; and, also, an easy way to embed the code into the right places on the pages which tell the CMS (or blog, or cart) where to place content.

Those two things are absolutely "must have" features... at least now, finally, these days.

Please, Xara... please... finally... get this fixed.

Please. I implore you.


- HarpGuy