Style Master 1.2
Company: Western Civilisation, Inc.
Estimated Price: $29.00
http://www.westciv.com
Being a web designer certainly has its ups and downs. Keeping up with the latest technology is definitely a down! With the digital world constantly evolving, web designers near and far have to struggle to keep their websites up to snuff with the latest and greatest HTML standards. The My Mac website had last been redesigned in issue #35, and was due for a change. Sure, it was great in 1998, but it’s now 1999 and technologies such as HTML 4.0, DHTML, and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are becoming commonplace on today’s more popular websites. Our website was aging.
Consequently, I knew that our next website redesign had to take advantage of some of these new technologies in order for us to stay on par with 1999 standards, namely Cascading Style Sheets. So, I went out and bought the outstanding DHTML Visual QuickStart Guide. A great book, let me tell you. However, the book can’t be on the computer with you every step of the way. Style Master can.
Your Knight in Shining Armor
Style Master is a Cascading Style Sheets editor and a whole lot more. Learning a new web standard is always challenging, and having a little help never hurts. Style Master includes an excellent tutorial to help you understand how CSS work, and what is the best way to implement them into your website. The tutorial guides you every step of the way, through the toughest parts of CSS. Then, when you have an understanding of how CSS work and how they are coded, the tutorial introduces you to Style Master. Once introduced to Style Master, the superb manual takes you through every aspect of the program in a plain-English fashion. It’s definitely one of the best pieces of documentation I’ve ever seen distributed with any program.
With Style Master, you don’t have to worry if you get every little bracket and semicolon in its proper place in the code, because Style Master does the coding for you, while still allowing you to manipulate it freely. Basically, Style Master conforms to your level of skill in CSS. For a novice in CSS, like me, I used all of Style Masters’ “editors,” such as the “Text Style Editor,” to create the style sheet I wanted. Then, as I got more advanced, I could easily manipulate the code by hand whenever I wanted, because it is always fully visible to you. In short, Style Master makes sure that WYS is WYG.
Style Master includes a superb interface, which fully complies with Mac OS 8.x interface standards. It lets you select which browsers to target, making sure that the style sheet you create will work in Netscape 4.x and Internet Explorer 4.x, for example. Style Master will even embed or link style sheets into your already existing HTML documents, making it easy to integrate it into your existing suite of HTML tools. Below is a picture of Style Master in action editing the mymac.css document, which contains the majority of the design elements behind our new website.
Requirements/Availability
Style Master is available in a 15-day unlimited demo version at Western Civilisation’s website at http://www.westciv.com. Users can purchase Style Master for only $29.00, a complete steal for this incredible program. Style Master is available in 68k, Power Macintosh, and Windows 95/98/NT flavors, and requires 4MB minimum available RAM. Style Master requires System 7 to function properly on the Macintosh.
The Summary
Style Master is essential for anyone involved in Cascading Style Sheets. Whether you are just learning them now, or have been using them for a year now, Style Master will work for you. It fully supports CSS-1 and CSS-P (CSS-Positioning), includes an awesome manual, and even checks your style sheet to make sure it will function properly with today’s popular web browsers. All in all, Style Master is a wonderful tool that should be on every web designer’s hard disk. Highly Recommended.
MacMice Rating: 4.5
Adam Karneboge
webmaster@mymac.com
Websites mentioned:
http://www.westciv.com
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