[To the devs] Let us talk about GWD behavior: working file vs publishing file!

[Daniel Antonucci]

Hi guys,

thanks to work on GWD and to release it as open source software, I really appreciate your great job.

This time I am writing you because I believe there are some behaviors in GWD that need to be rethought. For me it is time to separate the working file from the publishing file and these are my considerations:

• Using a working file with is own extension it is easier to handle for the daily tasks, we can open any working files easily and directly with a double click, I suggest to use ".gwd" as extension.
  

• Why we need a working file? This is easy to explain: I noticed that when you create a specific rule, like a specific color, and you apply it as class in your html tage, as you would do with any standard html/css page, automatically GWD deletes the class and applies the rules inside the parent class of each element. This behavior can make sense when you export the ads but doesn't make sense at all when you are on working on the file. This behavior is against the principles of the CSS, that is designed to use one rule on many targets, so when you make a change it is applied on all its targets; but if GWD splits the rule on each parent class, that means that you have to change each rule manually. One can use the "find and replace" function, but why? It would be better that we can handle the working file as a standard html/css document and only during the exportation GWD can "messing-up" the css rules as it considers the best, at this point nobody cares about the css or the html. Handling the CSS as it is designed is a big achievement, for example the one who needs to work with corporate assets or colors can reuse their rules each time, it would be great thus in next future to have a color palette to manage the colors as swatch colors, that is really common to have in a css document.
  

I hope with these suggestions to promote a constructive critique in order to make (even more) GWD the standard tool to realize online advertising.

Best regards,

Daniel

  

[San Khong]

Thanks for the feedback Daniel. We will investigate your feature request and let you know when it's been prioritized.

San

Google Web Designer team