1 Topic by sirena (edited by sirena 2007-05-10 23:17)

  • sirena
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Topic: What's the CSS editor all the groovy people are using?

Just a quick question - what freeware CSS editors do people use or find best? [that work on Win32]

I've been using TopStyle Lite for years (v3.1).

While I am generally happy with it and can live with its faults (it does tend to crash with complex CSS pages, and from time to time the color selector barfs out too), it strikes me that things must have moved along a bit on the CSS editing tool front.

Nowadays CSS is much more widely deployed, and judging from some of the CSS layouts you see around the place, some people must have access to some good tools.

So...what's the [preferably freeware] CSS tool all the groovy, hip people are using today?

  • Registered: 2006-06-29
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Re: What's the CSS editor all the groovy people are using?

dreamweaver does a really good job.  I remember using topsyle a long time ago, but dreamweaver does the trick for me.

3 Reply by Paul

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Re: What's the CSS editor all the groovy people are using?

I mostly use any old text editor though if there is a bug I can't spot quickly then topstyle pro which can go straight to the inevitable missing semi colon.

  • Registered: 2006-03-03
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Re: What's the CSS editor all the groovy people are using?

notepad++ or crimson editor

dreamweaver is good and will end the stuff for u automatically, but i recommend you learn your css by heart first

  • sirena
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Re: What's the CSS editor all the groovy people are using?

Aha. Looks like the same old suspects - dreamweaver, notepad, crimson editor etc - are still popular then.

Good. I am not being left behind then smile

I still bemoan the primitiveness of the tools though. Develop line-by-line, with a text editor, using a crude vocabulary, requiring a knowledge of all sorts of idiosyncratic hacks and quirks, etc etc.

Still very 1950's, IMHO. Hard to be productive.

  • Registered: 2006-06-05
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Re: What's the CSS editor all the groovy people are using?

I don't use it myself, but I've heard that CSSEdit is a good one for Mac OS X.

  • From: Leuven, Belgium
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Re: What's the CSS editor all the groovy people are using?

Dreamweaver, but I don't let it generate my CSS.

  • Registered: 2006-05-03
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Re: What's the CSS editor all the groovy people are using?

I find Editplus to be good.
Un-fussy and straightforward with good syntax highlighting.

(It's just a glorified text editor though)

--Alan

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  • Registered: 2005-10-07
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Re: What's the CSS editor all the groovy people are using?

guardian34 wrote:

I don't use it myself, but I've heard that CSSEdit is a good one for Mac OS X.

I use it and love it. I HIGHLY recommend it to any Mac users. Version 2.5 is out.

  • Registered: 2004-05-24
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Re: What's the CSS editor all the groovy people are using?

AlanCollier wrote:

I find Editplus to be good.
Un-fussy and straightforward with good syntax highlighting.

(It's just a glorified text editor though)

Agreed in full.

  • Registered: 2006-06-29
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Re: What's the CSS editor all the groovy people are using?

sirena wrote:

Still very 1950's, IMHO. Hard to be productive.

now thats not fair.  if it was very 1950's we'd be choosing between a 2 dollar hole punch / 3x5 cards or some fancy punch card machine, to write our css.

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Re: What's the CSS editor all the groovy people are using?

Notepad variant (notepad2 but it tends to crash, so I'm looking for a new one).

Jeu de rôle en ligne sur table virtuelle ⁂ Shadowrun France ⁂ Chez Blacky

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13 Reply by sirena

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Re: What's the CSS editor all the groovy people are using?

This discussion has prompted me to have a good look around at what's available re CSS editors...

I gather no-one is using the super-cool looking Style Master, from Western Civilisation, for Mac + Win32:

http://westciv.com/style_master/index.html

I'm going to download it now and have a look - it is shareware but apparently it only degrades some functionality after the registration timeout, not die completely.

Who knows - I may even buy it - it also comes w. excellent looking templates and tutorials.

14 Reply by Paul

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Re: What's the CSS editor all the groovy people are using?

I've tried it and dismissed it like all the others. CSS just isn't difficult enough to need specific tools. I just find they get in the way and far from aiding productivity they slow things down. The time consuming and tricky aspects of css are the parts that none of the available tools can cope with anyway and I don't see the point in installing software just to do the easy stuff. The only advantage I've ever found in using a tool like topstyle is when dealing with relative addresses, it does make it easier to get all the links to background images right the first time.

The text editor I use is Textpad though I occassionally use Ultradedit, but neither are free.

P.S. I may not like their editor but Westciv's tutorials and documentation are terrific and free.

  • From: France
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Re: What's the CSS editor all the groovy people are using?

The only use I could find for a "css editor" would be small things like handling relative link (as per Paul), validation on the fly (to avoid typo)...

Maybe a css compressor output on some case, but that's rare enough, gzip is already doing a fine job.

Jeu de rôle en ligne sur table virtuelle ⁂ Shadowrun France ⁂ Chez Blacky

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16 Reply by sirena

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Re: What's the CSS editor all the groovy people are using?

You are both tough cookies, Paul and Jérémie.

I tend to agree though.

Once you've passed a certain level of familiarity with CSS, any tool can get in the way more than assist.

But that's the problem with CSS - getting to the point where you feel confident that you know how to handle things.

The issue with CSS is that most of the 'real' CSS knowledge isn't in the W3C textbook, as it were. It''s in the experience of various gurus, who are CSS initiates, who pass it down in a very medieval, guild-like fashion to the rest of the world.  If tools like Style Master can break this down, more power to them.

For much the same reason, I also very much like the Yahoo User Interface Guidelines - http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/ - inc their CSS stuff, like the Grids resources - http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/grids/

It all starts to make building production grade CSS easier and requires much less esoteric knowledge.

17 Reply by Paul

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Re: What's the CSS editor all the groovy people are using?

Frameworks like YUI might very well be the way website and web application building is going. For the past few years everything has been about semantics and cutting out anything which was not semantically meaningful. However, there has been something of a backlash. More and more people are beginning to take the view that provided content is marked up semantically then the fact the it may be nested in a few unsemantic divs doesn't really make any difference. I can quite easily see people increasingly taking an approach of reducing web sites and applications to a series of markup + css widgits which can just be assembled by cutting and pasting. This doesn't necessarily have to have an adverse impact on design either since the design and therefore the visual appearance of a website has more to do with how the various elements are assembled. One obvious place where this trend is really taking off is in web forms where you could argue that there really is only one best way to markup and style a form.

From a productivity point of view I think the framework approach is far more valuable than anything a css editor can do.