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Rarely do I get a chance to speak of a product that is about as flawless as it gets. Many consider it be the best of the breed and that is Top Style, a single purpose application that not only helps you create Style Sheets it teaches you how to do it too.
That's the hallmark of a great authoring tool plus it has a flexible interface that allows you to easily change the application to suit your needs. It's a feature rich program whether your use the pull down menus or the panels that make up the working spaces of the program.
That's some of the good news. The bad news is that it's a Windows only product. Mac and other OS users are out of luck. Too bad.
Here are several screenshots of the application. The one below I made to try and show you how I use it. In the center panel a file called "global.css" is present. I write my style rules there. Off to both sides and the bottom are panels that give me information as to what I'm doing.
There are far too many features to review here. A few of my favorites are:
- A Wizard to help you get started writing a .css file from scratch You can validate right your CSS from within Top Style using the W3C validator (of course I'd like that!!).
- Layout Manager which allows you to customize the application to your liking.
- Style Inspector panel that gives you the choices of values you have for every style property (who can remember them?)
- Browser compatibility alerts and ways to deal with issues that come up.
- Site Summary reports that helps you manage style sheets that you might be using for all of your sites
- A Style Sweeper that organizes all of your style declarations.
And on and on. I love this puppy. Do you have a favorite CSS editor? What do you use? I'm always interested in hearing what people use to create CSS.
To find out more about Top Style see Bradbury Software. I believe there is a fully functional "try before you buy" version to download. The cost of the application is $79. This one I'd give it the rarest of rare raves because I'd almost buy it before I try it. And you'll never hear me say that again.
