TopStyle

TopStyle was a CSS/XHTML/HTML editor and integrated development environment (IDE) for Windows developed by Nick Bradbury and later maintained by Stefan van As. The editor was code-centric rather than WYSIWYG, with integrated support for W3C validation and previews generated by the Mozilla Gecko, Internet Explorer Trident, or Apple's Webkit layout engines. A "Lite" version of TopStyle 2.0 was bundled with JRun Studio, which itself was based on Macromedia HomeSite, an earlier editor also created by Bradbury. The "Lite" version was also bundled with Homesite and Macromedia Dreamweaver MX.

Features

TopStyle supported HTML, XHTML, and CSS editing in various revisions, along with validation checking for standards and browser compatibility issues. Checking optionally covered a variety of levels, such as a strict W3C CSS specifications, to issues on a wide variety of browsers. This style checker feature provided detailed warning messages allowing the user to visually see if parts of HTML or CSS code would be incompatible with a particular browser.

The software also supported converting deprecated HTML styling to CSS code, converting HTML code to valid XHTML, and checking for orphaned code or pages. Syntax highlighting was supported for PHP, ASP, CFML, CSS, XHTML, HTML, JavaScript, and VBScript.

TopStyle integrated with HTML Tidy, W3C's validation services, and the Windows application CSE HTML Validator. TopStyle 4 could use CSE HTML Validator to check links. Macromedia Dreamweaver MX included an extension which allowed TopStyle to be used as a dedicated CSS editor.

Product history

Original TopStyle box design

TopStyle was created by Nick Bradbury, who previously created HomeSite in 1996. HomeSite was acquired by Allaire in March 1997, by Macromedia in 2001, and finally by Adobe Systems in 2005. 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. Independent software developer Stefan van As acquired TopStyle in December 2008.

Release history

• TopStyle 1.0 was released by Bradsoft in 1999.

• TopStyle 2.0 was released electronically by Bradsoft in 2000. A "Lite" version (which could only open one file at a time) was included with JRun Studio.

• TopStyle 3.0 was released by Bradsoft in 2002.

TopStyle 3.12 from NewsGator

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

• TopStyle 4 was released on May 31, 2009. New features included (UTF-8) unicode support, live FTP editing, support for browsers released since TopStyle 3.5 (IE8, Firefox 3, Safari 3, and Safari 4), Script Insight for ASP + PHP + ColdFusion, support for iPhone (and iPod touch) webapp development, support for HTML 5, IE8 document compatibility, and many more including many bug fixes and improvements.

• TopStyle 5 was released on November 30, 2012, with support for CSS3. Further development was discontinued in 2016.

External links

• TopStyle official webpage
  • TopStyle 3.12 at NewsGator Technologies (archived 2006-04-28)
  • TopStyle Pro 2.0 / 3.0 at BradSoft (archived 2000-12-07 / 2002-08-02)
    • Differences between TopStyle Lite and the full version of TopStyle (archived 2000-05-10)
    • About TopStyle (archived 1999-10-12)
  • TopStyle forums
• TopStyle at Wikipedia