CSS tutorials

 

Tutorial 00: What to use?

Not really a tutorial, but sooner or later you will face the question, where to write your code. Unless you already solved that, of course.

Honestly speaking, any application with syntax highlighting enabled would be fine. You can also write in plain Notepad I know a lot of people who started this way. I never could bring myself to use it, though.

There are quite a few programs for webdesigners which have step-by-step built-in creators and such, of course, for beginners it's better if they didn't use those options.

Anywho, onto he subject itself.

  1. Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 - that's what I currently use, and what I love using. I don't dig into possibilities this program offers, and they must be great. I simply like to use it due to shortcuts, and auto-filling of tags. It also helps me to find new solution thanks to the dropdown, let's call it, hints. Plus, it has a built-in validator.
  2. Notepad++ - ugraded version of Notepad, with syntax highlighting. Quite useful since is loads faster than Dreamweaver or similar programs. It's perfect for little changes on long files (mostly php in my case). On the other hand I found it annoying due to not self-closing tabs after closing the program. Some may find it comfortable, for me it is not, it's the same why I don't really like using Opera.
  3. PL Pajaczek - I used to use it for a few years, until something went wrong with syntax highlighting and re-installation helped only for a few first runs. (It was a full version from a PC magazine.) Comfortable because of shortcuts and hints, similarly to Dreamweaver.
  4. Notepad - honestly, I can't see shit there. It's okay for editing short files or simple CSS, and I do use it for that purpose. However trying to find an error in Notepad is terrible. That's why we have syntax-highlighting and line-numbering Notepad++.
  5. MS Front Page - used 2 or 3 times at the very beginning. The programs puts a lot of it's own code which is not needed. Or at least it used to back then. My experience with it says not to use it.

So, I think that's all. And plus the Linux text editors. They're smart enough to color the code. Choose what you want, but for the beginning I can recomment Notepad++, it is sufficient enough ;).