Lightly Toasted

I have got a little surprise for you all wonderful people. John Allsopp, Maxine Sherrin and I have been talking a bit about Style Master 4 lately. Especially John as I bug him a fair bit with minor changes and CSS nags(ask him ;-). I have been looking forward to the Style Master 4 upgrade and am so excited its here. I would very strongly recommend you go buy a copy if you don’t have one or atleasy try out the demo. Here are a few questions I decided to ask John and I hope you will enjoy reading them as much as I did.

What is unique about StyleMaster 4 that others CSS Editors (on macintosh and windows) don’t have?

While there are many features in Style Master you won’t find in any other applications (and I’ll talk about some in a moment) probably the big thing that is different out Style Master is our philosophy.

You’ll find that the other CSS development tools are really all about “coding” CSS. We have long recognized that while you need to code CSS, the point of it is design. So we focus very much on the needs of designers and developers, rather than just on coders.

To that end, we’ve always had powerful, easy to use editors for all of CSS. Not just complex dialog boxes that let you cook up your selectors, for example, but simple to use ones, that actually give you feedback as you go.

As an example, if you use our Language Selector editor to create this selector body:lang(zh), it will tell you that this will select “elements marked up as when their language encoding is Chinese”
Now of course most people won’t be using such selectors, but its an example of the kind of philosophy we have.

Now in version 4 we have tried to really rethink how developers and designers want to work with style sheets. As CSS becomes more and more mainstream, it won’t be your hardcore early adopters, happy to hand code, it will be real world designers and developers who want CSS to “just work”. The kind of people who are used to Illustrator, Photoshop, Quark and so on.

What we recognized as profoundly lacking in all web development tool, not just CSS tools, was a tight conceptual integration of CSS and HTML. That doesn’t mean being able to edit both in the same package, which lots of tools do. I means support to help developers understand how their CSS and HTML interact.

No what am I on about here?

Well, in the bad old days, you did everything in HTML. Want some style? Just whack a element in your HTML. Want a layout — build a huge table structure in your HTML. While it had a lot of downsides, it certainly was easy to understand.
Why is this bit of text bold and red? Because of this element.

Now enter CSS. It’s all about “action at a distance”. Why is this bit of my web page bold and red? Well, lets find the style sheet for the page. OK, now lets find all the statements in the style sheet which select this element. Which one takes priority over the others?

all of this takes a lot of know how and brain power. Brain power you’d b better off designing, not keeping track of your code with. Well, we think so anyway.

So in Style Master 4, we have this cool feature called “X-Ray”. Click any part of your preview page, and X-Ray shows you all of the statements in the current style sheet which select that element. Now double click the element, and the most specific statement is selected, ready for editing.

Or think about going the other way. We have all these statements in our style sheet. Let’s take one. div#mainbanner {...}
Now which part of my page does this style?
Traditionally you would have to open the HTML, find

and then look at your page in a browser to work out which it is.

But with X-Ray, you can click a statement in your style sheet, and all of the elements in the preview document which are selected by the statement are highlighted. We call it X-Ray because, well, we think of it as an x-ray of your page.

This is just one example of many that help making working with CSS in Style Master a whole different ballgame from any other software.

Why did you choose to do this upgrade when you are so busy and headed for SXSW?

Because we need our heads read.

But seriously, Style Master had been in beta testing for some time. It had been a busy time for westciv since that testing began. I got married, Maxine went to Japan and New Zealand, our testers suggested some significant improvements that meant pushing back our release date by a much better application.

When we first planned SxSW (where we are both speaking, and Style Master is sponsoring the Web Design Awards) we thought Style Master would have been finished for at least a few weeks.

As the deadline approached, we felt it important to have the new version done. So it was a fair number of late nights and early mornings, and a fair bit of stress, but we got there.

And we are really excited to be heading off to Austin. We’ll finally get to meet up with people we’ve been corresponding with for many years (Eric Meyer and Jeffrey Zeldman are just two people we’ve known online for the best part of a decade, but have never met), and catching up with others, like Joe Clark, Dave Shea and Doug Bowman, who we met when they came out for Web Essentials last year.

What will you do then? Take a well deserved rest?

Rest? I wish Then it will be back here to redouble our efforts for Web Essentials ‘05 (on again this year, late September, in Sydney), working on a series of workshops Russ Weakley and I are planning for the middle of the year, hopefully to take to several cities in Australia and New Zealand for starters, and I’ve got some ideas for some cool new software, plus there are many features we have in mind to make Style Master even better.