Archive for 'Software Reviews'
CSS Edit 2.6 Rocks
Posted on April 25, 2008, under Software Reviews.
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a widely used Web-design technology that lets you create styles that can be applied to one or more blocks, or ranges of text, on a Web page. Instead of applying formatting locally, repeating the details each time you want particular text or a layout to be formatted similarly, CSS lets you write once, use many times.
CSS was designed to bring standards to Web formatting. Until the use of CSS became widespread, the formatting code produced by many Web-design programs was based on a combination of table cells and browser hacks that didn’t produce the same appearance consistently across popular browsers, and the HTML that was produced was often unreadable and almost impossible to properly edit. With CSS, you could allow a design program to write code for you, yet it was still possible to figure out that code if you needed to make behind-the-scenes tweaks, especially for browser compatibility.
The theory behind CSS sounds terrific, but the best Web design programs are expensive, steep-learning-curve packages such as Dreamweaver, while most cheaper and simpler Web-authoring programs don’t give you control over CSS or previewing. If you’re trying to work in between—if you want exact control of appearance and styles, and especially when you’re working with sites that use templates to insert text from a database of content—MacRabbit’s CSSEdit is a nearly ideal middle ground. This deceptively simple program bridges the gap between hand-coding CSS within a program such as Bare Bones’s BBEdit () and using a full-blown Web site development tool such as Adobe Dreamweaver CS3.
