Website development software. CSS editors

There is a great variety of programs that can help webmasters to develop high-quality websites. CSS editors also belong to website development software.

What is CSS?

CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, is a style sheet language that is used to describe the look and formatting of web pages; the main purpose of CSS is to separate the document presentation from its content. Such separation is very convenient: you can change the presentation style of a page without having to edit its content. CSS is used for describing colors, fonts, layout of the elements on a web page. A cascading style sheet may be embedded right within an HTML page – it will be an inline style or an embedded style. It can also be created in a form of a separate file and referenced by the required HTML page – it will be an external style sheet. The main HTML document references the external style sheet with the help of special tags:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/style.css">,

where style.css is the name of the file that contains the style sheet.

Thanks to this the style described in an external style sheer may be re-used as many times as you wish.

What are the most widespread CSS editors?

The most appropriate software for writing and editing CSS style sheets are special CSS editors that split into two groups: text editors and visual editors.

A traditional Notepad may be used as a text CSS editor. To create an external CSS style sheet in the Notepad you should write the syntax of the style sheet and save the document with the .css extension. Along with the standard Notepad, it extended version – Notepad++ – is also used. Notepad++ has a feature of CSS syntax highlighting.

RapidCSS is a text CSS editor. This editor is small in size, but it contains enough useful functions, such as syntax highlighting, code auto complete, CSS checker and validator, instant style sheet preview, CSS code explorer, CSS code compressor, CSS code formatter and beautifier etc. Besides, RapidCSS has a built-in CSS reference that will help beginning webmasters to create their first CSS style sheets. This editor is paid, but it is a great assistant in website development.

One more example of text CSS editor is Free CSS Toolbox, a free editor. Toolbox is a simple editor, that is very convenient and easy-to-use. Free CSS Toolbox can boast of such key features as syntax highlighting, code auto complete, CSS validator and CSS code compressor.

Stylizer is a visual CSS editor. The principle difference of this editor from the rest of editors is that it is built in into a web browser (Mozilla Firefox or Internet Explorer) and the CSS code can be edited practically “on the fly”. Besides, Stylizer uses grid interface instead of a text editor; it makes the occurrence of any mistakes in the CSS code practically impossible. Stylizer CSS editor is available for the users of Windows OS only. There are two versions of Stylizer: a free and a paid one. Free version of the program does not allow to perform certain operations with the style sheets that are available in the paid (full) version. However, quite often the functional of the free version is enough.

One more very popular visual CSS editor is TopStyle. This editor, as well as the above-described one, is paid, and it is available for Windows users only. The main advantages of TopStyle are the following: an opportunity to compare directly how the site will look in Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox; an opportunity to predict errors that may occur in Internet browsers despite valid CSS code.

Along with special CSS editors there also are general-purpose editors that support editing of cascading style sheets. Such editors are: Macromedia HomeSite, Microsoft FrontPage, Adobe Dreamweaver, and others. These editors provide visual and textual tools for creation and editing of inline and external cascading style sheets. However, these editors cannot boast of great variety of such tools, and some of them are often devoid of an opportunity to create external cascading style sheets – you can describe the styles in the body of the HTML page, nothing more.

Described text and visual editors do no comprise the full list of all existing CSS editors, there also are a lot of free and paid programs that are designed exclusively for Microsoft Windows, or Apple Macintosh (Mac OS X), or support both of these platforms.

How can CSS editors be useful?

CSS editors are first of all intended to facilitate the work of web designers as much as possible. The use of specialized CSS editors reduces the possibility of error occurrence in the code syntax, accelerates work with the code, allows to see the result of applied functions and effects at once. Visual CSS editors are a wonderful choice for beginning web developers, because they almost don't require the knowledge of CSS codes. And text editors, in their turn, are more appropriate for professional webmasters who prefer to create cascading style sheets manually.

Thus the main advantage of CSS editors is that they allow to code CSS styles quickly and effectively!

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website development, website development software, css editors, visual editor, text editor, web development