Challenger XT allows Web designers to create interactive, DHTML-animated web sites using the accuracy and ease-of-use of a program they already know — QuarkXPress. Challenger XT is a QuarkXPress XTension that incorporates the power of Cascading StyleSheets, absolute positioning, and 3D layering.

Advantages to working in QuarkXPress are obvious: Designers needn’t be experienced HTML code writers to create exciting web pages. In Challenger XT, all Cascading StyleSheets, Layers, and other HTML elements are created automatically in the background.

Many WYSIWYG editors force users to prepare such elements manually beforehand, but because Challenger XT relies on the powerful graphics and text features of QuarkXPress, this is no longer necessary. The CSS output of Challenger XT is compatible with both Netscape Communicator and Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0.

You can even open the exported pages in Macromedia Dreamweaver, add functions, and continue editing in Dreamweaver. Challenger XT is shipping for Mac OS and is QuarkXPress 4.0 and 3.3x compatible.

Challenger XT uses Cascading StyleSheets technology to make the creation of WYSIWYG HTML layouts incredibly simple.

Even DHTML effects — including real-time animations, drag-and-drop elements, and fade or wipe effects —are a possibility.

To help you implement these technologies and effects, Challenger XT adds three intuitive palettes to QuarkXPress:
• The Challenger XT palette provides tools for image settings, hyperlinks, and browser previews
• The DHTML palette provides a set of powerful effects
• The XML Tools palette for XML structure handling

Challenger XT is capable of exporting XML from QuarkXPress. To imagine this, think of your QuarkXPress documents as information containers. A newspaper, for example, has thousands of stories that can be exported as searchable files retrievable by databases, archive systems, and (of course) by Internet users.

The process is easy: Just create the Document Type Definition (DTD) for your structure and select the content items belonging to the article. With one click of your mouse, Challenger XT then creates the XML document. When you output XML documents from QuarkXPress using Challenger XT, you create consistent structures that are easy to handle under any system that supports XML.

To help publishers in producing database-driven web sites, Challenger offers direct posting of XML data into any Web-capable database.