Few Iceweasel (Firefox) Web Development
goodies
I'm trying to enter into web dev this days and I felt obliged to
share with you about 3 interesting plugins for (Iceweasel) in
Debian or Firefox if you're running Linux or some other OS
platform. The
DOM Inspector ,
Error Console and
HTML Validator Plugin are an absolutely must have ones if
you're into a serious web dev.
Herein I'll write a short review to each of the nice FF plugins to
get you a slight idea about them:
DOM Inspector
The DOM Inspector (also known as DOMi) is a developer tool used to
inspect, browse, and edit the Document Object Model of documents -
usually web pages or XUL windows. The DOM hierarchy can be
navigated using a two-paned window that allows for a variety of
different views on the document and all nodes within.
To proceed downloading the plugin use
the following
dom inspector download link
Here is how your DOM inspector would look like.
You see as you click a node in the DOM Inspector, the element in
the page is highlighted so you can easily track down layout issues
and CSS problems.
It's an interesting fact that
DOM
Inpector is also available as a plugin for Thunderbird
It's use on Thunderbird is similar to the Browser use e.g. as taken
from DOM Inspector's thunderbird plugin download page:
DOM INspector -
"Inspect the DOM of HTML, XUL, and XML
pages, including the mail chrome."
To install DOM Inspector on Debian's Iceweasel Firefox fork,
use:
debian-notebook:~# apt-get install
iceweasel-dom-inspector
It's worthy to mention the
Error Console which is a
fundamental part of the
DOM Inspector
The error console allows you to view real-time javascript errors
and bad CSS declarations. This is a VERY handy little feature. You
can open the Error Console in Firefox by selecting the 'Tools' >
'Error Console' menu. Once opened, you'll probably want to hit
'Clear' and then refresh the page you're checking for javascript
and CSS errors.
To add the dom inspector extension to Thunderbird or as the fork is
called in Debian (Iceape), execute the following command:
debian-notebook:~# apt-get install
iceape-dom-inspector
2. Another completely mandatory plugin for a Web Developer this
days is the Web Developer add-on
plugin
This plugins has many goodies a web dev could benefit, some of the
nice features it supports are:
the ability to modify and clear cookies and cache, display form
details, disable enable css styles, disable page colors and tons of
more handy stuff.
- Installing the
Web Developer plugin on Debian again is a
piece of cake with apt.
debian-notebook:~# apt-get install
iceweasel-webdeveloper
There you go after restarting Iceweasel another bar field will
appear in your browser, from there you can customize the web dev
actions you would like to perform.
Here is a quick glimpse on the Web Developer plugin:
Besides that I suggest you check
my older post which explains the importance for a website to be w3c
compliant