I just heard about XWD today and decided to check it out. As a professional who uses Dreamweaver CS4 and Expression Web 2 I'll admit to a little skepticism. To my surprise I was quite impressed with the rendering of the sample site linked to from the Outsider page in the three browsers I've tested so far, IE7, FF3, and IE6 in a virtual machine (that last one really surprised me by being so consistent to the others).

The only issue I noticed in these first-pass tests was the flashing of some kind of outline with a folded-paper icon in the corner on all of the rollovers. I presume that that has been noticed and a fix is in the works.

The thing is, I tell my clients that their sites will be valid and accessible. So, it was with some trepidation that I ran a W3C validator and Cynthia Says Section 508 check against the sample site. I was even more surprised at the results. No, it didn't pass, either one, but the reasons would be easily addressed by the dev team.

Things like three errors on the same img tag, for the border, width, and height attribute values not being quoted (XHTML requires all attribute values to be quoted string literals) and the tag not being self-closed (also required by XHTML). In other words, little things that the devs can put into the generator without too much difficulty.

The accessibility check failed on the same img tag, but it didn't give a reason, just "failed" in boldface. I suspect that it had something to do with the src url having a QueryString, but since it didn't elucidate, I'm just guessing.

At any rate, one failed element on accessibility, and likewise on validation, for a version 1.0 WYSIWYG editor, and consistent rendering across the three browsers that, between them, have about a 90-92% share, ain't shabby at all.

Does anyone know if the issue of the quoted string literals and the self-closing of unary tags has already been bugged or not, and if not, who to report to about it? I really like the looks of this product, and I'd like to see these little version 1.0 bugs ironed out.

I've been using Xara Xtreme since it was Corel Xara, along with Xara 3D, et al. It figures that if anybody could come up with a standards-compliant, cross-browser compatible, true WYSIWYG editor, Xara would be the folks to do it.

cheers,
scott