Xara Web Designer design philosophy

Or ‘Why doesn’t Web Designer support fluid RWD?’ In a nutshell Xara Web Designer is a WYSIWYG design tool. For the designer this means what you see and design on the Xara page is exactly what your website viewers will see, down to the pixel and the exact line wrap points. And this applies just as much to RWD pages as to normal non-responsive websites.  Xara Web Designer is the only web design tool that provides this unique benefit - you can design precise page layouts with precise object and text positions, with complete design freedom (anything anywhere), text repelling around irregular shapes and photos, and myriad other design features, and yet be sure of the exact text position, wrapping points and everything else on the page. You can be sure that your design is exactly what your viewers see. One of the consequences of this approach is that fluid text (text that re-flows as you change the browser width) is not supported, and is not compatible with this WYSIWYG design philosophy.  With dynamic, fluid text you cannot be sure where things will be on the page - because it varies continuously. Line wraps, and thus column lengths even vary between different browsers. For designers this lack of certainty and variability is a nightmare of testing. You can’t flow text around irregular shapes. You can’t, for example, have an arrow pointing at a particular word on the page, because with traditional web design, you can’t be sure of where words and paragraphs wrap, or be sure of lengths of text on the page.  So fluid text means you could not get the precise ‘guaranteed right’ WYSIWYG layout accuracy that is the benefit and main intent of the Xara Web Designer software. This is the reason that around 90% of professionally designed websites are not fluid. Designers want design certainty, and this is what Xara Web Designer provides. In this respect Xara Web Designer is much more like a traditional ‘desktop publishing’ design tool (where obviously 100% exact WYSIWYG is required) than it is a traditional HTML web design tool - and yet Xara Web Designer produces efficient, standards compliant, cross browser compatible HTML5 websites, with automatic Retina compatible photos and graphics.  And with Web Designer 10 all this remains true for multi-variant responsive website design, while still being a totally ‘programmer-free’ solution. Finally, step back, consider why RWD was invented in the first place?  It was to enable single HTML designs to respond (instantly and without reloading any HTML) to narrower screen widths of phones and later, tablets.  Mobile devices do not support fluid, variable width browsers. So the ‘fluid’ RWD provides no benefits to the very devices RWD was designed for! In summary ‘fluid web design’ goes against the ‘exactly placed’ and ‘design certainty’ principle of Web Designer and, secondly, mobile devices do not support fluid design anyway. (To be clear they do support dynamic switching to different widths when you re-orientate and this RWD is fully supported by Web Designer 10).