The Aptana project started in 2005 with the purpose of creating a complete toolkit for web developers and designers. After a number of beta and milestone releases, this week the developers finally announced the finished product and branched the application into a free community edition and a paid professional one. Does Aptana Studio, an Ajax-oriented "Web IDE," really provide a new breed of a product, serving the needs of developers and designers? And if it does, is it suitable for that category of casual internet users who only support a personal site and a blog or two?

Back in April, the prominent ezine A List Apart started a survey of "people who make websites." The findings of their Web Design Survey have been announced earlier this month and are available for free download as a 1.6 MB, 82 page PDF document.

Due to the open source Mozilla platform at its core, the Firefox browser boasts many third-part additions. Many of those extensions are intended for the masses; some were created for use by technically minded people, who either create webpages professionally or happen to be just learning HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Here are some of the best addons for web designers. Links are to the relevant addons.mozilla.org page, with additional links to existing project websites.

Tablecloth is a lightweight, easy to use way to add style and behaviour to HTML table elements. By simply adding 2 lines of code to an HTML page you will have styled and active tables that your visitors will love.

Photoshop Express has been in development for at least half an year now, and during a presentation at the recent Photoshop World event the online application came across as nearly finished. John Loicano, Senior Vice President at Adobe over the Creative Solutions Business Unit, presented a product that seemed to work without a hitch, so now we have to wait and see when it will launch officially.

In this listing the focus was to provide a selection that covers as many different types fn online CSS tools as possible. The criteria were the quality of code, friendly interface, and usefulness. Feel free to discuss the choices and omissions in the comments below.

As you are most likely aware, the current version of HTML is designated 4.01. It has been in use since 1999, and since that time the web has gone mainstream, while HTML 4 established itself as the immutable standard, together with XHTML 1. Still, nothing lasts forever: big companies are dedicating staff to work on the creation of a new and improved version of the venerable mark-up language.

Color, along with texture, form, shape, etc., is one of the fundamental elements of design: it is a basic visual component of any composition. In the age of the Internet, working with color for designing web pages still follows age-old rules like color harmonies and balance, but in the same time new concepts, like web-safe colors, usability, and RGB values, have emerged. Luckily, there are free tools that help the web designer deal with the new issues, and you'll find some of them listed in this post.

Ah, the web design classics. Back when the web was but several years old, Microsoft created their first web page. Today, they are kind enough to provide a screenshot of that jewel for our viewing pleasure.

The nice folks over at the web-based form creation and hosting service FormAssembly have created a repository of customized CSS designs for web forms. The designs are free to download, modify and use.