If you’ve been itching to get ahold of the next version of TopStyle for CSS editing, looks like you’ll have to itch a little while longer. From the official forum thread, Nick Bradbury weighs in on the Cascading Style Sheet fanatical discontent:

Apologies for not jumping in here sooner – I guarantee that while I’ve been quiet in this thread, I haven’t been quiet about making sure that TopStyle has a future. The delay in our response hasn’t been due to a lack of desire to create a new version, but instead a lack of time and talent (let’s just say that I bit off more than I could chew when I decided I could handle two popular apps by myself!). As Ronnie states, we’re still planning a TopStyle 4.0. However, there’s a good chance that someone other than myself will be in charge of developing it (I will, of course, still be involved in its design).

I use TopStyle for CSS editing, too – as does most of the working Windows world. No word on whether Microsoft’s new Visual Web Studio is any better (or worse) than TopStyle, though. PSPad comes with TopStyle lite, which enables me to quickly edit Cascading Style Sheets. For the most part, I can do simple CSS tweaks from personal memory. Still, I’m looking forward to new versions of TopStyle (the definitive CSS editor on the Windows platform).

TopStyle 4.0

Am I the only one who didn’t know this existed? It’s like a HomeSite clone, but I wonder if it works any better than the classic HTML editor from yesteryear (which hasn’t improved a bit since it left Nick’s hands).

Visual Web Developer provides a powerful WYSIWYG visual design surface to create your Web applications and includes all of the common formatting controls such as font selection, font sizes, font formatting, bullets and numbering, and more.

But here’s what impresses me the most. We’ll see if it actually lives up to its hype, though:

You write HTML the way you want it to look. Visual Web Developer leaves it that way. Period. Your white space, indentation, casing, word wrapping, and carriage returns are retained throughout development. When you write your HTML code and then switch to design mode, rest assured that it will remain as you wrote it.

In many ways, I wish TopStyle would evolve to the point where HomeSite once stood. I’m gonna give Visual Web Developer Express Edtion a shot, if only because they have a tutorial on Microsoft for Displaying Your iTunes Library. I don’t use iTunes, but it’s impressive that someone at Microsoft recognizes the fact that Apple’s iTunes pwns the market.

Microsoft Visual Web Developer Express