FR: Built in Scrollable text boxes

[slavelle]

I love the things that XWD is allowing me to now that would have been a nightmare with CSS/html tools. But there are some things that are easier to accomplish with the regular automatically expanding doc flow. A decent compromise is a scrollable text box, especially if it is sized appropriately for the content.

I have done several examples of scrollable <div> and am adding a few to my current personal website. I will be making updates to certain areas of the page frequently and don't want to have to mess up the design or eliminate older information. This is sort of blog-like, but without a DB backend. In my case, I simply replace html within the exported file (or inside the placeholder in XWD).

It would be nice to have a facility to accomplish the same thing. The text could only use web safe fonts so that Xara has an easier time incorporating this into some sort of "style" (a seperate Feature Request) in the outputted code.

Seems like it would be an easy enough thing to code for, though I'm not sure how you would display the "widget" in the design view. It would even be fine if one could just assign a scrollable box type to an area and then some expansion of the html placeholder to allow for some really basic editing (like this forum or similar) to be able to get the code in.

I think you get my point.

[covoxer]

I'm not sure I get the idea here.
Do placeholders work for you?
What exactly is missing in current placeholders approach?
Thank you.

[slavelle]

It's not that placeholders don't work - in fact they work quite well, but I suppose what I'm getting at would be a more built-in way for this particular feature in the same way as there is a built in way for a flash placeholder instead of just inserting the html for flash display in the normal html replacement box.

Fundamental to this would really be something like this:

On the placeholder tab of the dialog, there would be an option next to the "replace with html" option that said "scrollable". This would automatically create the <div style...> stuff.

Then, a slight expansion of the built-in editor for some basics, again in a similar fashion as the post editing on this forum - not an elaborate code window like .net or even notepad++ for that matter - just something better than a really small window with no highlighting, tabbing, etc to make the process of updating this part a little easier.

I know some of this steps a little outside the Xara intention of making things simple, but I think, with the non-dynamic page length "issue" (which I sort of like anyway) that is often brought up on the forums, it would be a nice middle ground to allow for a little easier process for code updates and for the inserting of commonly used objects, such as a scroll box.

Thanks for taking the time to listen.

[jclements]

I'd like to have something like Slavelle suggests too.

Perhaps, it could be even as simple as typing and formatting the text, selecting it, Right-Clicking, and picking "Make Scrolling Frame" from a context menu.

The result would be a text frame with a unique frame border or an icon (like the lock used for clipviews in XaraPro) which easily identifies it as scrolling text. This would make it more of a "What you is what you get" interface and would eliminate having to call up the Web Property's Placeholder dialog.

[cursor]

Would it not make sense to allow for either horizontal or vertical scrolling?

... and, perhaps, provide a scroll rate option?