Is CSS file export in the works?

[Kurt8]

Hello,

I haven't been keeping up on the forum due to workload so sorry if this has been asked before.

When I first heard about XE4 and the HTML export I jumped right on the upgrade. A lot of web designers that I work with like to do their web design mockups in Photoshop, Illustrator or Adobe Fireworks. I do mine in Xara of course. This allows me to show a client what the site will look like and easily make changes and with HTML export I can even give them a version that they can click through in a browser. This is all great.

My question has to do with the next step in my workflow. After the customer agrees to a design, I normally send a single image file to an online service like www.psd2html.com and they spit out web compliant XHTML and CSS files of the graphic design mockup. Wouldn't it be great if Xara could do this on its own? I'm wondering if anyone has any thoughts on the technical feasibility of such a function in Xara. If Xara could do this I think it would become THE tool for web design using this workflow.

Thanks for reading.

Kurt

[BobInce]

they spit out web compliant XHTML and CSS files of the graphic design mockup. Wouldn't it be great if Xara could do this on its own?

It does. Xtreme 4's HTML filter produces standards-compliant XHTML output (modulo a few generally minor markup issues).

What Xtreme doesn't do is generate variable-size, liquid-layout or sliced-and-optimised pages as a good hand coder might to achieve the smoothest, most efficient, maintainable and accessible code. There's a good reason for this: because it can't. It's a 2D visual design tool, with no concept of how different parts of the page should react to text-content, font and window size differences.

To give Xtreme this kind functionality you'd have to add many functions for parametrically-resizing page elements, which would be really complex and effectively turn it into a full web page editor - and even then, most web page editors that work like that still produce very poor output. Personally I'd rather have an excellent drawing package than a barely-competent web page editor.

[ss-kalm]

........... Personally I'd rather have an excellent drawing package than a barely-competent web page editor.

No-one ever said that Xara was a web page editor. It will produce a perfectly acceptable web-page. Editing that web page is not what it was designed to do.

[tonylondon]

It does. Xtreme 4's HTML filter produces standards-compliant XHTML output (modulo a few generally minor markup issues).

What Xtreme doesn't do is generate variable-size, liquid-layout or sliced-and-optimised pages as a good hand coder might to achieve the smoothest, most efficient, maintainable and accessible code. There's a good reason for this: because it can't. It's a 2D visual design tool, with no concept of how different parts of the page should react to text-content, font and window size differences.

To give Xtreme this kind functionality you'd have to add many functions for parametrically-resizing page elements, which would be really complex and effectively turn it into a full web page editor - and even then, most web page editors that work like that still produce very poor output. Personally I'd rather have an excellent drawing package than a barely-competent web page editor.

Well put, Bob