External Stylesheet and div areas

[Purple Edge]

The traditional way of designing a css based site is to position the content in a graphic file, the cut it up and create a stylesheet to position the various parts.

It would be great if XWD could be used to create named areas on the page and export to a html page with a separate stylesheet defining each of the named areas.

i.e. it would be like Dreamweaver but with a much stronger graphical component. To do this in Dreamweaver needs additional graphic tools linked in, but XWD is close to providing this functionality now. Perhaps it could be a separate setting for XWD - say, "design in Outline mode"

At present XWD is pitched at "Mum and Dad", or personal, web designers, having the ability to design divs with an external stylesheet would open it up to all the professional designers and developers. It's a similar concept to the suggestion for Wordpress template designer, this technique could be used for all cms template developers.

If you wanted to get real fancy you could include a css editor

[covoxer]

Could you please provide a precise specification of this feature as you see it.
Thank you.

[Purple Edge]

I've attached a Xara file showing the layout of a website using DIVs, it is roughly based on the design of the www.comformark.com website which uses the Website Baker CMS. I've only shown the divs and static content.

The objective is to design a layout that can be used by a CMS. Xara would create an external stylesheet, with NO absolute positioning, and NO inline styles.

Ideally the tool would include a CSS editor where css styles can be specified and the values edited.

[Purple Edge]

Can I suggest you have a look at http://php.opensourcecms.com/ - this website lists info on 224 php cms systems and gives you an indication of the number of people using these systems to create websites - 10's of thousands I would guess? These are your potential market for Xara Web Designer if you can get it to generate "clean" html code with a separate style sheet.

In scouting around I have only found one tool that currently does this, and I have to admit, after a bit of playing around with it, it looks pretty good! Have a look at http://www.artisteer.com/ - if you think you can make a better tool with XWD then you have a big market on your doorstep!

[Pixelpusher]

I have to agree with this. Artisteer is awesome at creating CMS based html and css. You can design the layout in Artisteer and import to Dreamweaver or Expression for further refinement. If Xara could do what Artisteer does for CMS, you guys could take the market share.

[Purple Edge]

I bought Artisteer and have used it a bit more since my original post.

The css it produces is overly complex - I think that Xara could do a better job with appropriate development. I import the designs I create in Artisteer into Xara as full page images and then slice them into the appropriate divs - this is where Artisteer fails, it creates far too many divs.

If I could create a page design in Xara and then slice it into divs that can be exported into an automatically created css file, then Xara would be unbeatable!