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PCNet File Catch
I've struggled with writing code for 30+ years. Programming
languages, database queries, macros and HTML just don't come naturally
to me. Oh, I can get by, but it's torture. For HTML I've used a variety
of tools over the years; I started using my favorite text editor and
writing macros that were specific to HTML. It helped. I switched to
Dreamweaver 1.2 and Homesite 3.0 and used and liked them, but they're
getting very old and they were expensive! I still have version 1.2 and
they want a fortune to upgrade, so I'd mostly gone back to my text
editor.
Newer features such as XHTML and style sheets were just brutal for me in
my text editor. I was floundering more than I should have. But old
habits die hard and I was attached at the hip to my trusty text editor.
Then I ran into TopStyle Pro. My world changed.
First there's a standard editor with an option to customize your view.
I've set it up to display an editor window, a files window and a
preview:
Click on the image to enlarge it.
There's even a spell check and an interface to CSE HTML Validator.
Options abound. If you want to see a full screen preview, just click a
button. Select a full screen preview, split between IE and Mozilla.
Want to link a style sheet to multiple files? A wizard handles it.
There's a color picker and a style checker which validates the style
sheet against multiple browsers and alerting you to problems. You can
even pass your style sheet to the W3C's CSS validation service so you
can be sure you're in compliance with W3C specs.
While I could go on, I won't. Suffice it to say that TopSytle won't make
me the world's best coder nor will it design the best web site for me,
but it will help me to do a better job. Simply allowing me to deal with
the different browsers easily is already allowing me to do my job
faster. It scares me to think what a real pro could do with it.
In fact I wrote this using, you guessed it, TopStyle and believe me,
it's never been this easy. -- Don Watkins
Get more info at the TopStyle web site
here.
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