Tops in CSS Style

Last time we discussed in-browser XML document editing driven by XSLT. Today, we take a step backward to satisfy all of you who are still dealing with documents formatted with Cascading Style Sheets. The tool is TopStyle Pro from Bradbury Software (see links below), an HTML, CSS and XHTML Editor for Windows.

TopStyle Pro was written by Nick Bradbury, the creator of HomeSite, a relatively famous Web site creation and editing tool.

Not only can TopStyle Pro edit HTML, XHTML and CSS, it can also check CSS syntax against multiple browsers, upgrade outdated (deprecated) HTML to CSS, convert HTML to XHTML, track CSS class usage throughout a site and preview content side-by-side in both Internet Explorer and Netscape Gecko.

TopStyle Pro is impressive in its range of features. The Style Checker feature validates style sheets against multiple browsers and flags invalid properties or values as well as warning of bugs in popular browsers that might cause problems even when a style sheet is perfectly valid.

The tool can also send style sheets directly to the W3C’s CSS Validation Service to check against the official CSS specifications. TopStyle Pro also integrates with the open source utility HTML Tidy to fix problems in HTML coding and to convert HTML to XHTML.

The Site Report feature lists styles used in a site and identifies style classes that aren’t defined in any style sheets, as well as see which defined style classes aren’t being used.

This is a very useful tool and requires Microsoft Windows 95/98/ME, Microsoft Windows NT Version 4.0 with Service Pack 3 or later, Microsoft Windows 2000 or Microsoft Windows XP and Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 or later required for internal previewing and HTML-based help features.

BradSoft offers a free version of TopStyle called TopStyle Lite that has a reduced feature set. The trial version of TopStyle Pro allows 25 uses and the licensed version costs $79.95. Volume discounts are available.