More Firefox Rox
June 2nd, 2004
I’ve recently been working on a redesign of a website done completely in css - no tables, no junk markup (ok, well, very little junk). One problem with using css for positioning and layout is that it’s sometimes hard to visually see what’s going on with your page. Dreamweaver MX 2004 does okay at keeping up with most css, but at some point, it usually breaks. What to do? Well, our good friends at mozilla.org have already thought of this and already have a great tool to help out. In all the new versions of Mozilla and Firefox you can simply use the DOM Inspector to see what is going on in your page. This has saved me hours of trying to figure out why objects are falling off my pages.
Here’s a good (short) intro to the DOM Inspector written by Richard Rutter that will help get you started. I must confess, I’ve been using the DOM Inspector for years but this post helped me realize that I’ve been missing some of its best features. Doh!
Another indispensable set of tools for Firefox are the developer tools written by Chris Pederick. Turn off css, disable images, resize windows, validate your site, get a size report, easily see other people’s css … all those things that used to take so long … now so fast and easy. Thanks Chris!
