No Javascript

[xtom]

From what I see placeholders seem to ignore the height anyway and the content isn't constrained in the y direction which is good. The placeholder only seems to be constrained in the width but in most cases I'd imagine defining the position and width is ideal.

I don't think the problem is with placeholders but with how the whole of the content/page reacts to dynamic content displayed by placeholders.

The reason I would add scrollbars to placeholders is because the rest of the page content doesn't move to accommodate the dynamic content in placeholders. If you've got a placeholder positioned above anything (in y dir) it's going to overlap what's below it because the content below doesn't move down. If you do use the javascript tweak it ties it to the footer and leaves unwanted gaps.

Ok this bit might be getting a few steps ahead but also if you use something like an accordian menu or something that expands/shrinks it gets even more complicated for a javascript solution to deal with, which is why a html/css solution would be better and more accommodating than a javascript one which just won't cope in as many scenarios.

See image attached...

[pauland]

xtom, I completely understand your point and example (good diagram), though that is entirely a stage beyond what I was suggesting. Part of the problem is that in delegating content to placeholders users either need to describe precisely the height of the placeholder content (as they do with the placeholder graphic), or get Xara to just not interfere.

Your example using content that adjusts position and size is doable in html/CSS because the browser will adjust the page render according to the div content, but for a product like Xara, the HTML page generation replicates the design at design time and cannot produce a layout that adjusts to dynamic content because it would need some kind of AI analysis of the design to do so.

HTML CSS layouts are based on CSS constructs devised manually to support certain layout behaviour. A human being generates the CSS knowing how browsers interact with HTML and using CSS features to replace graphical elements to give adjustable layouts ( margins, borders, backgrounds and the like). This takes real skill and effort and requires that the human designer relates his conceptual design art to HTML constructs - that sidebar which is a thin box with text inside, becomes a div with a margin, border and padding and will adjust to the text inside. Xara software cannot infer such relationships from a square drawn on the page with some text over it. Other web design system use templates that can be configured. Effectively the templates embody the semantics of the sidebar and the user is just customising a pre-built layout.

I can't see Xara (or any other) software supporting this soon.

[xtom]

The green boxes just represent the placeholder objects in the editor, I should have made it clear I didn't mean for them to be graphically reproduced/exported on the design (I'm reducing my expectations slightly from the other topic here ) I was just refering to the positioning of other content relative to the dynamic content that the placeholder outputs. So basically just changing y positions or some kind of non-absolute flow for certain objects. Perhaps if objects that are grouped somehow to a placeholder could be positioned relative to (or flow off) the end of the placeholders content vs absolutely positioned from top of the page.