TopStyle is an CSS/XHTML/HTML editor for Microsoft Windows developed by Nick Bradbury and owned by NewsGator Technologies. The editor is code centric instead of WYSIWYG, with integrated support for previews using either the Mozilla Gecko or Internet Explorer Trident layout engines. The software is available as a commercial version with a trial period, or a free version with fewer features. As of 2006, Linux or Mac OS versions are not planned.

History

TopStyle was created by Nick Bradbury. He also created Macromedia HomeSite (then just "HomeSite") in 1995. HomeSite was acquired by Allaire in March 1997, Macromedia in 2001, and finally (as of 2006) Adobe Systems. Nick Bradbury left the company to found Bradbury Software in 2003 and created the editor TopStyle and a news aggregator titled FeedDemon. Bradbury Software was acquired by NewsGator Technologies in May 2005. (a company unrelated to Claria Corporation and their adware Gator e-Wallet.)

Features

TopStyle supports HTML, XHTML, and CSS editing in various revisions, along with powerful checking for standards and browser compatibility issues. Checking optionally covers a variety of levels, such as a strict W3C CSS specifications, to issues on a wide variety of browsers. This style checker feature not only provides detailed warning messages, but enables the user to visually see if parts of HTML or CSS code would be incompatible with a specific browser.

The software additionally supports converting deprecated HTML styling to CSS code, and converting HTML code to valid XHTML and checking for orphaned code or pages.

TopStyle integrates with HTML Tidy, and W3C's validation services. It also integrates with a number of editors and tools by other parties.

Syntax color coding for PHP, ASP, CFML, CSS, XHTML, HTML, JavaScript and VBScript is included.

Future

TopStyle 3.5 was released on October 15 2007 (version 3.5.0.9). New features include better support for Windows Vista and browsers released since TopStyle 3.12 (Safari 2 for Windows, IE7, Firefox 2, Opera 9), Box Spy (tool that shows padding/margins of boxes in the preview window) and many more including a large number of bug fixes and improvements.