Thanks for responding, Acorn. I only did a little investigating into assigning attributes to text. Indeed, I found it very limited. From what I can tell, you can’t apply gradients, transparency, rotation, skewing, etc. in Xara without causing it to be exported as images… never as html code. The only thing that worked for me was a flat (wall) shadow on unaltered text.

As you mention, you can produce some fairly intricate details in shadowing for unrounded rectangles in Xara. In fact, as I continued with my research after my previous post, I found that code following the material design concept usually involves two, and typically three, shadows (umbra, penumbra, and ambient) for any shadowed component. The result is realistic and awesome. To be able to accomplish that in Xara, I suppose one would have to manually insert the code into the exported html file (which would be time-consuming and risky), or overlay multiple copies of the rectangle, each with one of the shadows. The latter option is not too bad as the little bit of extra coding wouldn’t be too heavy for bandwidth.

Unfortunately, that method of creating “buried” copies with shadows still won’t work for rectangles with rounded corners, rotation, or skewing, as even the most basic of those shapes export as images.

I’m glad you agree that fixing this would be a great addition to the software.