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Three Tools Every Web Person Needs
Friday, July 3rd, 2009After yesterdays post on some simple SEO (search engine optimization) tools, I thought why not post about a few tools that every web person needs.
OK, so you probably already have this one, and it’s not really tool, but for the web developer tool bar, you’ll need FireFox to run it. Besides, 3.5 just came out and its pretty nice.
This is a FireFox plugin, so get FireFox. The Web Developer Toolbar is extremely helpful because it allows you to disable or enable css and images, highlight elements and has quick links to the HTML and CSS validators built in. There are a ton more tools, so check it out. Very handy stuff.
XRay is a javascript bookmark that when clicked, gives you a really cool floating box over the currently opened webpage. When you click on anything on the page you can see its id and class information, its element type, its borders, padding and margins. This is super helpful for finding those wacky display issues. It also shows the current element in the DOM tree so you can back out of that element one parent at a time to see where problems might be occuring.
I hear there is more than on way to use firebug, but I just got the FireFox plugin. FireBug gives you some really great tools like a javascript console for the page you are on, information about the page loading, a full DOM tree with details and even an HTML outline so you can drill down through your content to get to a specific item to see its properties. It will even show you what CSS styles are applied to that element, what assigned it and any other CSS declaration that were overwritten to product the final results.