Over the past few months, I have made a concerted effort to learn html, CSS, and a little (so far) JavaScript. I want to understand what Xara is generating from my web designs, and I want to be able to manipulate it as much as possible. I’ve found on talkgraphics several enlightening and enormously helpful posts.
I know that there are some advocates here for coding some things by hand rather than using Xara’s coding. Acorn is the one I’ve noticed most prominently, but I’m aware there are some others.
My question for the advocates is: How much manual coding (particularly CSS) do you think is appropriate, and how do you determine where to draw the line?
I’ve noticed for example that with a few exceptions (e.g., named text types and some shape divs), Xara is big on using inline styling. I see no way to provoke Xara to generate classes automatically for similarly styled elements and to place the class styling in a style sheet, it simply repeats the CSS styling inline for each element. (One of Acorn’s posts concerning assignment of html classes was very helpful in allowing this by hand). This is at odds to best practices standards which indicate that styling should be placed in an external stylesheet whenever possible, with page-specific exceptions being placed internally in the head, and exceptionally (and sparingly), the CSS styling can be placed inline.
Do you advocates make an effort to conform to the best practices standards by editing the coding, or do you allow Xara to do its thing and accept the result? If you do modify it, where do you set the limit where things just get too complicated to mess with?