Style Master

I went looking to make some CSS landing pages for several ads running and I realized something. In general, I know absolutely nothing about CSS or good layout using XHTML and CSS together.

I tried running through some W3C tutorials on CSS using Syn as my editor (primarily because I was too lazy to downl0ad the Visual Studio Web Express Edtion), but syn has some serious limitations (especially when it comes to line length).

Enter Style Master 4.6 by Western Civilization Software. The interface is very visual studio-like, but available for both Windows and Mac (YAY). It allows me to get very detailed down to multiple descendant elements and still see what it looks like. It is a paid application but at $60 is blows GoLive away period. Multiple browser support is built in and you can add browsers from a menu option. I really like seeing how my style sheets are going to display in Safari for Windows, primarily because Safari is very unforgiving, but if it shows up correctly there, it will be fine in the other browsers without much issue. Style Master did it without question.

There is a tutorial available with the application to instruct the basics of CSS/XHTML which I thought were pretty good for basics (explained what DTD were - that's not basic, that's theory, I like it). The tutprial showed you how to do it in code as well as how to use the style master application.

Over all I am mucho impressed. Style Master did receive 4.5 ratings from Macworld too, so I'm not the only one. Check it out, if you are wanting div based html with CSS driving the entire design, you will want this cheap but effective and intuitive application.