Style Master lets you easily create and edit cascading style sheets. This means you don't have to know anything about the syntax and rules of cascading style sheets to work with them. All you have to know is what you want the HTML documents that use your style sheets to look like. Style Master lets you make them look like that.
As you may already know, style sheets comprise a series of statements, which instruct a browser how to draw particular types of elements. Every statement has a selector and a series of properties.
Style Master helps you create every type of selector with point and click ease, with onscreen explanations to help you learn how style sheets work, and to ensure that what you have done is want you want to do.
Style Master also helps you edit the properties of your statements. Because there are dozens of properties, each with potentially many different values or types of value, editing these properties can be daunting. Style Master, with balloon help to explain the effect of each property, along with its potential values, as well as with easy value editing, makes getting the right effect with style sheet properties as easy as possible.
Style Master helps you preview your style sheets in the real world, that is, in the browsers that others will use to view your pages. As you develop your style sheets, preview them in whatever browsers you want, using preview documents of choice.
No browsers fully support every feature of style sheets perfectly. Take a look at our Browser Rap Sheets to get some idea of what we mean by this. To help you work around these potentially frustrating limitations, Style Master lets you nominate the browsers that you are targetting with a style sheet. Then, as you work with Style Master, it will warn you about the selectors and properties that aren't supported by the browser or browsers you are targetting.
You can edit style sheets using a simple text editor, afterall, style sheets are just plain old text. So why use a style sheet editor to do this?
First, selectors can be a little more complicated than just single HTML elements. In fact there are 7 major kinds of selector, and their use can be quite subtle. Style Master helps you learn and understand the use of each type of selector, and then helps you use them correctly every time. Remember, style sheets are like computer programs, and mistakes can be very hard to identify and correct. Using Style Master, you won't ever make a mistake. Don't underestimate the potential for mistakes. A glance at the style sheets newsgroup will show that people are forever making simple mistakes with their style sheet syntax, then wasting a lot of time and energy looking for the mistake.
Secondly, there are several dozen possible properties that might or might not be applied to a selector. With Style Master, you don't have to remember the name and spelling of these properties, nor which properties are mutually exclusive, or interdependent.
Style Master helps you preview as you develop, with one click (or even 'live' as you edit) in as many browsers as you can or want to preview in, using the preview documents of choice.
Last, but not least, we have incorporated the information in our Browser Rap Sheets into Style Master. You will find this feature invaluable while browsers continue to only partially support style sheets.
Plenty of good reasons to justify going with a dedicated style sheet editor.
The process of working with a style sheet is as follows:
First, we need to create a style sheet.
To learn about creating style sheets, see the chapter Creating and Opening Style Sheets.
If you have already created a style sheet, or you are working with one you might have downloaded, you'll need to open it in Style Master. Style Master can open style sheets created using any application, on any platform. For more on opening style sheets using Style Master, see Creating and Opening Style Sheets.
Because even the latest versions of browsers don't fully support style sheets, you'll need to decide which browsers you are going to target with your style sheet. Style Master helps you target specific browsers. For more on targetting browsers, see Creating and Opening Style Sheets.
Style sheets comprise statements, which tell browsers how to draw particular elements on a web page. The next step in the process is to create the statements for the style sheet. Working with Statements and Selectors covers this.
As you create statements, you will want to give them properties. Properties tell the browser how to draw an element selected by the statement. For the full story on how to edit properties, see Working with Properties.
While you develop your style sheet, you will want to preview it in the the browser or browsers that it is designed for. To learn how to preview in browsers, using preview documents of your choice, see Previewing.
Once you've created your style sheet, you will need to embed it in a HTML document, or link the HTML document to it. See Linking and Embedding for more on how to do this, what the difference is, and why you should do one or the other.
Style sheets are powerful, and like all powerful technologies, there is always a bit to learn. This manual will help you understand the procedures involved in using the application, and along the way, it explains some aspects of style sheets. But to really get the most out of style sheets (and Style Master) you might like to take a look at the following.
Style Master has comprehensive balloon help. This explains basically every menu, pop-up menu, field, list and button. Not only does it explain the application, and how it works, it even provides detail on style sheets where possible. When you first start using Style Master, turn it on and have a look around. You will be surprised by how much it can help you. If you ever find yourself confused, or at a loss as to what you should do, turn it on.
Choose
from the menu to turn on balloon help.Some people prefer to learn how to use a new application by working through activities and real world examples. We have a tutorial about Style Master which does just this. You can find this tutorial at our Style Master web site.
You'll also find pointers to other style sheet tutorials on the web, reviews of style sheets related books and a whole lot more. We like to think of ourselves as the House of Style.
As part of the documentation you downloaded with Style Master, you should have a Style Sheets Tutorial. This tutorial works you through every aspect of cascading style sheets, so if Style Master is one of your first contacts with cascading style sheets, you might like to have a look at this tutorial to start with, or at least use it as a reference as you work through the manual. Indeed, particularly in the chapters on Selectors and Properties you'll find we have many links to the tutorial.
If you don't have the Style Sheets Tutorial, you can download it from our Style Master web site.
Coming up, we'll look at Creating and Opening Style Sheets, where we will learn how to create a new style sheet, open existing style sheets, and even how to open style sheets embedded in HTML documents.