Stylus

Overall Opinion: Working as a programmer is fundamentally a job of translation. It requires taking human language and putting it in terms that the computer can interpret and return back in a way humans can understand. This might mean creating CSS classes that create complex color and design schemes for your website or processing vast amounts of gathered statistics in Python and then delivering them as a more easily interpreted visualization. XML is a language that takes the importance of interpretation a bit more literally. It allows you to create documents that are readable by both humans and computers. This lends the language an important level of specialization in the coding space, but it can also be an exceedingly complex language in large part due to its complex and vast interrelated specifications. Stylus Studio is a tool designed to assist XML developers with the tools they need to implement their visions, and it achieves its goals admirably. Stylus Studio is currently one of the best XML editing platforms around, and that's a huge relief in an environment where XML tools are sometimes underserved. XML largely resembles a traditional IDE, but there are some unique distinctions that allow it to better suit the needs of XML developers. As with many combined JavaScript/CSS/HTML interfaces, XML splits your script among different tabs that display the results of your code in differing formats. These tabs offer a schema, a grid, color-coded text, and a tree laden with icons. If development is about translating language, then Stylus Script is undoubtedly multilingual, and the variations on how you can read the results can provide an incredibly nuanced view of what your scripts will look like in action. Working with XSLT is a breeze with Stylus Studio, a huge boon if you need to convert XML files into other formats like HTML or plain text or vice versa. A WYSIWYG view provides the results of your XSLT in just about the cleanest and most intuitive formt you can imagine. XPath integration is also well supported and exceedingly well implemented. If you need to interpret values in an XML document or categorize or highlight nodes, you can do so with a simple text box that's always present. Accessibility is achieved exceptionally well in this platform. All the basic tools you'd need to work with XML are usually clearly labeled and available without having to hunt through menus for results. Additional support is provided for designing XSD schema, utilizing a graphical editor so users can get the results they need while writing less code, but you can dig deeper into the layers with more complex visual analysis of the results. Converting other files to XML is as simple as a press of a button. Stylus Studio should be a useful tool for practically any power web developer. Due to the huge amount of variables available in XML and its specialized use, it's a language that's rarely learned extensively. But when you need something done in XML, Stylus Studio allows you to accomplish it without having to sit down and hunt through syntax for a reasonable solution. It may not get daily use, but it's good to have when you need it.

Pros: Greatly simplifies the process of working with a complex but specialized language Graphical interface gives you a clean and approachable view of your results Clean and intuitive editing design

Cons: A little expensive for such a specialized language editor Services a language with less versatility than many of its contemporaries