In our case, we want the button to run a javascript function that we are going to create, so enter javascript:sh_popup(true) into the link field. When you preview the page, clicking the box should pop up a javascript alert. (In Web Designer 6, you have to untick the “Connect automatically” box or Xara will helpfully insert an “ in front of your havascript Web Designer 7 cunningly avoids this annoyance.) As an example, create a button-shaped box, press Shift-Ctrl-W with the box selected, and try putting javascript:alert('Hello, world.') in the link field. In the “Link to Web or Email address:” field, you can insert the javascript. This can be inserted into any link, using the “Web Properties” dialog (Shift-Ctrl-W). In our case, we want a link target which starts with “javascript:”. For example, email me will open a mail compose window (assuming your browser can find a mail program). As you may know, HTML links don’t always have to point to web pages. The first part of the solution is to use the “link” mechanism to run Javascript from button pushes. This article describes how it can be done. After a couple of less-than-elegant attempts, I arrived at a solution which allows the use of the standard Xara layer architecture to design the pop-ups, but which gave me the close-box I wanted. So, I set myself the task of turning the pop-up layer into something with a close button. This makes it a tad hard to select and copy any text! Web Designer has pop-up layers, but they normally disappear as soon as the mouse is clicked anywhere on the page. The direction I wanted to stretch my web pages was to produce a pop-up which was consistent with the look and feel of the site (and preferably editable using the Web Designer features), and which allowed users to copy and paste the text from the pop-up box. The HTML, Javascript and css from Web Designer seem to be a lot less messy than most. This has a lot to do with the clean stucture of the pages it generates. Having explored “under the bonnet” a little, I have been impressed by how a little lateral thinking can extend the capabilities well beyond its ordinary functionality. But like most graphically-based packages, it has limitations when it comes to going beyond its basic capabities. The pages it produces look great, and are easy to modify, at least as far as appearance and layout are concerned. R ecently, I have been getting to grips with Xara Web Designer.

Xara web designer 6