Topstyle 2.5: a CSS editor

This review is an update for original Topstyle 1.5 review. It will be a review of the improvements to the tool.

If you need to create, maintain or understand CSS and use a PC, you should own this program. It makes creating and editing CSS a breeze, and has a number of user friendly attributes.

New features

Some new buttons have been added to Topstyle since version 1.5. They include ones to: make cutting, copying and pasting faster; to automatically add a style sheet to one or more html files; and a layout manager. Topstyle also offers you the opportunity to add and remove buttons as you need to.

A new addition to the Style Inspector is a toggle for a preview box. When preview is on, as you move from style block to style block, the small box under the Style Inspector will preview your style rules. This is in addition to the preview box below the edit window which previews all rules. The large box makes it somewhat harder to find an individual rule.

Topstyle has also added a new palette editor. From here, you can see the colours used in your project and what style rules each colour has been applied to. You can also edit the colours. If you find that you've used two almost identical colours, you can easily change one colour to match the other.

The icons on the top of this window allow you to replace colours, lighten colours, darken colours or change to named or web safe colours.

This editor allow those of us who forget what colours we have used to easily find that information. Also I needed to combine a few colours, I had far too many for one page.

The last updated feature is the addition of a Site Summary. This gives you information about all the stylesheets on your site and how they are used. Also, you'll find information on which pages have no styles, which have multiple style links and which has broken links.

This summary makes it easier to ensure that all pages are linked to the correct stylesheets, and that the stylesheets are used as expected.

Conclusion

If you do not own Topstyle yet, you owe it to yourself to download the evaluation copy.

If you do own a previous version of Topstyle, will it be worth updating? I'd say yes. Topstyle has added support for Netscape 6, Netscape 6.1, and IE 6. The addition of the Palette Editor which helps track use of colour and the preview box for individual rules are welcome new tools. The site summary which gives an overview of stylesheets, broken links to stylesheets, etc makes finding problems much easier.