There are now three inexpensive editors available for creating Cascading Style Sheets:

• Sheet Stylist
• Style Maker
• CoffeeCup StyleSheet Maker++

Many HTML editors will also begin to add support for CSS, no doubt, but there will still be some reason to consider a separate editor: a dedicated CSS editor will probably be more responsive to changes in CSS and CSS support by browsers, and can also, by focusing on one task, work out the most efficient and comprehensive ways to accomplish it.

Each of these CSS editors is still young and in an aggressive development stage, but both are quite usable and make builing style sheets considerably faster and easier than writing the code directly. Here are some comments, followed by a personal assessment of the current versions:

Sheet Stylist

Strengths

Sheet Stylist (Version 1.0 as of this writing) has a multitude of nice features, including:

• supports all CSS1 properties, and in some cases identifies those that are supported only by IE 4.0
• all style properties can be specified through one beautifully designed multi-tabbed dialog, arranged according to the conventional breakdown of property types (also reflected in this guide)
• drop-down lists for most values
• allows direct editing of style sheet code in addition to use of the dialog
• imports existing style sheets
• options for structure of style sheets for greater readability
• uses IE 4.0 or higher as a built-in previewer, with some controls for the browser
• automatically generates sample pages demonstrating all defined styles, or lets you preview them in an existing web page
• allows you to open HTML files and insert styles
• Wizard for quick creation of basic style sheets
• Wizard for linking style sheets to existing HTML files
• option to enforce use of safe web colors
• opens multiple files of different kinds and allows you to switch between them easily via document tabs or buttons

Conclusion

If you are intent on working seriously with style sheets and using them to the fullest capacity possible; this is currently the best tool I know of. No other tool handles existing style sheets as well or supports all CSS properties.

Danere StyleMaker 1.3

Strengths

With the release of version 1.3, StyleMaker has made a great leap forward. It now supports all, or nearly all properties available for IE 4.

• feels close to a WYSIWYG editor
• elegant, very easy to learn user interface
• instant samples for styles as you create them and add properties
• a very nice color chooser that will automatically convert choices to safe web colors
• simple tabbed dialog for choosing properties and values
• uses IE 3+ for previewing sample or actual HTML pages
• imports existing CSS files
• option to launch your favorite HTML editor
• Style apply wizard is versatile and offers a JavaScript builder that allows you to load separate CSS files for IE3, IE4, and Netscape4
• some nice sample style sheets

Weaknesses:

• a few minor implementation glitches cause certain properties to written incorrectly in some cases, or written in a way that IE3 doesn't support; if you know CSS, you will have no trouble spotting and fixing these
• only allows you to work with one file at a time (this is only an issue if you want to copy styles from one sheet to another easily -- but this can be done with a text or HTML editor)

Conclusions

I still find Sheet Stylist a stronger and more versatile editor overall, but StyleMaker has improved considerably since my initial review and definitely is worth a try.

CoffeeCup StyleSheet Maker++

This one has received good reviews elsewhere, but I can't say that I find much to recommend it. It has a tabbed interface for entering style properties like Sheet Stylist and StyleMaker, but has no ability to import existing CSS files. Instead, like StyleMaker, it uses a proprietary database to store style information; but since it lacks importing capability, CSS files cannot be edited manually without throwing them out of sync with the CoffeeCup editor's version. Also, the databases generated seem unnecessarily large, and therefore take a long time to load and save. Finally, it does not support all CSS properties. As of this release, I would have to rate this editor a distant third behind the other two.