The Tool that made CSS Magical...

So there I was, about to drag the downloaded OpenRefine into my Applications folder when I stopped dead in my tracks! That logo - it couldn’t be… Stylizer? The logo that defined my pixel-perfect dreams back in the day?

Hey, don’t take my word for it, have a look yourself! Here’s OpenRefine’s Logo:

And here’s Stylizer:

Okay sure, it’s not exactly the same but it’s close enough. Anyway, I googled it and to my surprise, Stylizer still exists!

Stylizer was my dream CSS buddy. Forget Dreamweaver - it was the industry standard (apparently it still is, depending on who you ask) - but it was nothing compared to Stylizer’s sleek interface and intuitive toolbar. Check this out:

It worked across every browser, even ancient versions of Internet Explorer (may they rest in peace). And you could style in realtime too - much like you can edit CSS in the browser’s console - but you’re not writing any CSS, you’re using that toolbar above.

Okay, so what happened?

Well, to put it bluntly, LESS happened. Then SASS, SCSS, and PostCSS and the rest is history. There was suddenly a method in the CSS mayhem. Structure and reusability like nothing before. But that's not all.

CSS Animations happened too.

And IMHO, that's what killed Stylizer. Browsers were moving much faster than Skybound could keep up with. You see Stylizer worked directly with stylesheets. It created perfect CSS3 rules but writing CSS directly was going out of fashion.

Bootstrap was taking over and it brought LESS along with it. But as I said earlier, without a way to add animations, Stylizer became yesterday's news. You could technically still do it by hand coding it, but that simply wasn’t it’s appeal to start with.

So yeah, this post is my little ode to Stylizer - the app that made my web pages sparkle and my heart sing. Here’s to the glory days and the joy of a tool way ahead of its time.

Thank you Stylizer!