Originally Posted by
gcellison
Hi Rob-Xar, I hope it’s not too late to make a suggestion. On the surface, it seems fairly straightforward and therefore easy. Whether or not that’s true, you know better than I. I apologize in advance for the length of the post.
A little background: After I had produced my first Xara WDP10 website back in 2014, I became away of the “heaviness” of certain components - things that Xara exported as image files rather than html code, which took a great deal of bandwidth to download on the user’s computer. When I revised my website the next year, I made great efforts to minimize such components, instead choosing components that I knew html could generate. But I made a mistake. I had read the manual from cover to cover before I started designing, so some parts didn’t register in my head. I inferred that components that Xara exported as image files were always downloaded.
In the last couple of weeks, after purchasing the extension of WDP16 and beginning the endeavor of the next redesign of our website, I read the whole manual for the first time since 2014. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that in fact, far more is exported to be generated by html code than I had imagined, and that many of the image files are only used by older browsers (like IE8 and earlier). I decided to figure out how it really works.
(Ignoring tiled background components) I have determined that Xara will produce html5 code that directly generates rectangles with any combination of the following attributes: rounded corners, simple linear gradient (any orientation, any color), outline with any width divisible by 0.1px, flat transparency (any orientation), any angle of rotation, any angle of skewing. This is incredibly powerful. While ellipses and polygons cannot be generated using code (instead requiring downloading an image file), I did figure out how to make circles, pill buttons, and ovals by rounding the corners of rectangles, allowing generation via coding.
Unfortunately, in Xara, flat shadowing (i.e., “wall”) can apparently only be applied to a plain rectangle with optional simple linear gradient (no rounded corners, outline, transparency, rotation, or skewing) and be coded for html. If any of these attributes are applied, it causes the component to be exported only as an image file, regardless of the recentness of the browser. But I did a little experimentation, editing the html file and inserting the shadow code (e.g., box-shadow: 5px 5px 6px rgba(0,0,0,0.25)) into the html code for shapes that included the attributes for rounded corners, outline, transparency, rotation, and skewing… and voilà… the shapes were produced perfectly by html! No image download required!
So FINALLY, for my suggestion for an improvement… That Xara would create shadows for such components with multiple attributes via html code, making the downloading of images unnecessary. With the importance of such forms with shadows in the material design concept, it would be a great help.
Thanks!