Recent User Thanks & Tables Question

[vectorspace]

I am a recent user of Web Designer 10 Premium having done some web design on the side for a very long time. As background, I have been a holdout for hand-generated and hand-edited HTML until recently when I gave up and researched tools like Xara's Web Designer. I have a technical and programming background, but am interested in graphic design too. I looked at a number of competing web development tools.

First, I have to say is great job! Wow. Web Designer Premium is an outstanding piece of quality software and great tool. My drive was to give up hand-edited HTML so I could be effective at responsive design. Xara has done it when a number of other tools have not and is very stable when other tools are riddled with bugs. It's cleart this software has a strong graphics design and layout slant and that Xara's tools have that bias too. That's fine, but it leads me to the one question and potential suggestion I have so far...

The lack of some sort of tables support in Web Designer Premium seems like a significant shortcoming. I hope I have missed something here, and can get advice where to look.

I have tried a number of things:

• Pasting copied table from another app -- results into a nice conversion of text objects and colored rectangles. This doesn't adjust well as it is all separate graphic/text elements.
• Found the table widget -- this is CSV data that must be imported, which is really hard to work with in the editor. An external editor of some sort must be used.
• Pasting an HTML Placeholder -- This creates the best rendition of a table, but requires it come from another application where you can have a GUI or WYSIWIG editing, but can access the HTML generated and past it as a placeholder. It cannot be edited in Web Designer Premium

I think an easy-to-edit "table of some sort" within Web Designer would be a great addition, if it is not there now. Tables are an essential element of organizing and manipulating information that cannot be quickly, efficiently, or easily handled by a graphics-element-only interface or set of tools. I don't care (usually) if the final resulting code within a web page is not a table, but some sort of table object within Web Designer would be an outstanding addition. The only time I would care about an object on a site acting like a table is if there were needs for live re-flow of content upon re-sizing or live re-sorting needs. Please consider adding something to this great software if it is not there already.

If there is a good solution for editing tabular data in Web Designer Premium, can someone explain how to do it?

Thanks!

[Acorn]

Others have floundered against this Xara reef, sadly.

Natively, you have two options:

1. Use Tabs and format everything by hand. Mostly useless if re-arranging rows of data.
2. Set up a set of boxes with a dynamic button effect; best demonstrated here: http://www.talkgraphics.com/showthre...Dynamic-Tables.

Most have gone over to using Google docs.

Nowadays, I used an HTML text editor and embed the resulting detail into a Placeholder, which I then manipulate with jQuery.

Xara continue to claim DTP capability but no native table manipulation is the main prosecution evidence against this claim.
I hold out at every release for table and proper page numbering.

Acorn

[vectorspace]

Thanks so much for this response.

At least it validates that my search for capability was somewhat complete. I have used Google Docs, but it is outside of the page. It is great when you need that much "power," but there are so many applications for native table feature in a web page that don't need that many features.

I hope Xara can avoid the apparent bias toward graphical elements enough to realize this one feature addition would do so much to improve an already-awesome application. It would so much further distance this product from others that it would be a great investment of coder time. If you Xara folks are on a Scrum -- put this at the top of your backlog! Please!

[Acorn]

Thanks so much for this response.

At least it validates that my search for capability was somewhat complete. I have used Google Docs, but it is outside of the page. It is great when you need that much "power," but there are so many applications for native table feature in a web page that don't need that many features.

I hope Xara can avoid the apparent bias toward graphical elements enough to realize this one feature addition would do so much to improve an already-awesome application. It would so much further distance this product from others that it would be a great investment of coder time. If you Xara folks are on a Scrum -- put this at the top of your backlog! Please!

Agile development, now there's a thing.
Acorn

[vectorspace]

Yea it is a thing... a wonderful thing sometimes and other times a beast! I manage three of those things with many more around me.