CSS: How much is enough?

[Acorn]

@pauland, the OP's ask is not about post-processing, which would be nugatory, but about augmenting Xara's failings through CSS inclusions.

As Xara is mainly a vector program, it should generate code that displays at scale (e.g., SVG) and not rely on clunky graphical outputs for NavBars, rotated (transformed) text, carousels and the like. Xara has been improving its code gradually but its insistence on SmartShapes for Tables and SPANned text lines fails accessibility criteria. My day job requires that this is satisfied where possible.

Most of Xara's styling is controlled through external CSS files already. Most are quite small. ani.css, however, is 100kB as is jquery.js.
Xara has failed to use techniques that would use already cached jQuery and the version it presented is now quite stale (as is ani.css).

Most of my CSS & Javascript exploits are to overcome Xara limitations.

Acorn

[ss-kalm]

... the OP's ask is not about post-processing, which would be nugatory, but about augmenting Xara's failings through CSS inclusions.

I disagree ... The statement "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?" implies that the OP wishes to clean up Xara's code post production.

[pauland]

@pauland, the OP's ask is not about post-processing, which would be nugatory, but about augmenting Xara's failings through CSS inclusions.

I'm not sure that's exactly right. We'll find out.

[gcellison]

Thanks to all for the input.

Acorn is more on track to what I was asking. When I saw how much potential CSS offers that Xara doesn’t take advantage of… then I saw that it is possible to do SOME of it yourself by manipulating the software, it offered some hope.

Best practices are about hand coding for maintainability and efficiency not for post editing machine-generated output.

Xara is all about allowing you to create websites without knowing about the intricacies of HTML & CSS. It produces inefficient HTML/CSS scripts, but in many ways who cares? The browsers are fast and most Xara users slow down their web pages by having humungous images that slow down the browser way more than some inefficient markup will.

Make a decision - if you want to have efficient web pages, learn more and ditch Xara altogether. If you like Xara, don't mess with the output it generates - it's an inefficient workflow that has little point.

Pauland… while developing my skills enough to do scratch design would be amazing, it isn’t a good use of my time. I am co-running a hotel, and the only website I design is ours. Nevertheless, I want to make it as impressive as possible. And I do think that efficiency matters. The search engines (particularly Google) are penalizing for inefficiency these days. We already show up later than Booking.com when someone searches for our name (who knows how much they pay for Google Ads). We don’t want to be moved off of the first page altogether 😉.

But my question was admittedly also meant to find out if anyone does happen to make post-export modifications. I wasn’t suggesting that I intended to or that I wanted advice in doing it. I just wanted to know if others were doing it.

[pauland]

The search engines (particularly Google) are penalizing for inefficiency these days.

Perhaps you can point me to some specific articles on this subject (especially if they have specific relevance for Xara generated code)?

We already show up later than Booking.com when someone searches for our name (who knows how much they pay for Google Ads). We don’t want to be moved off of the first page altogether ��.

But that may be because they have a huge number of visitors, backlinks and (as you say) advertising. Your hotel being named on booking.com would also contribute!

[gcellison]

Perhaps you can point me to some specific articles on this subject (especially if they have specific relevance for Xara generated code)?

Nope. I cannot. That's the unfortunate state of things. One reads in depth in the training materials from the most respected sources like Mozilla Developers, W3Schools, etc., and they all give similar advice. Whatever exceptions there might be, e.g., Xara's automated code generation, is not addressed. Xara itself only mentions that it meets the html standards, not addressing side issues like efficiency. We're frankly left a bit in the dark.

That said, there are some aspects of how Xara generates code that are clearly not optimal. Lots of shape manipulation (anything other than a rectangle, most combinations of rounded corners, rotations, gradients, skewing, transparency) that can be done directly by coding are handled by exporting as jpgs in Xara, compromising the quality and requiring lots more bandwidth. Exactly what Google's algorithm makes of this, I don't know.

[pauland]

Nope. I cannot. That's the unfortunate state of things. One reads in depth in the training materials from the most respected sources like Mozilla Developers, W3Schools, etc., and they all give similar advice. Whatever exceptions there might be, e.g., Xara's automated code generation, is not addressed. Xara itself only mentions that it meets the html standards, not addressing side issues like efficiency. We're frankly left a bit in the dark.

That said, there are some aspects of how Xara generates code that are clearly not optimal. Lots of shape manipulation (anything other than a rectangle, most combinations of rounded corners, rotations, gradients, skewing, transparency) that can be done directly by coding are handled by exporting as jpgs in Xara, compromising the quality and requiring lots more bandwidth. Exactly what Google's algorithm makes of this, I don't know.

I personally think that google could care less about code efficiency. Google cares about content and artificial attempts to improve SEO ranking, and of course, mobile support.

I hope you drop your quest for improving Xara code quality because it's just not worth the effort in any way and I don't think it really matters as much as you imagine it does.

Anyway we can agree to disagree about this.

Happy NewYear / New year's Eve!

Paul

[gcellison]

Paul,

I’m not sure if you have the impression that I’m trying to be antagonistic, but nothing could be further from my intention. I am curious and interested in exploring the possibilities. When I ask questions here, it is to solicit advice from those who have more experience and wisdom. And I always appreciate the responses.

I also like Xara a lot. I’ve been using it now for five and a half years, and I choose to stay with it rather than moving over to WordPress, or some other software. I want to take full advantage of its potential, which sometimes means recognizing its shortcomings and trying to work around them. I can see that others with the same curiosity have actually led to improvements in the software itself. I hope you're cool with it.

I wish you a great 2020 as well.