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Technology news and Jobs 
The Linux distillery Firefox hero: Legends of FOSS
The Linux distillery Firefox hero: Legends of FOSS | Firefox hero: Legends of FOSS |
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| by David M Williams | |
| Thursday, 06 December 2007 | |
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Page 1 of 3 Make no mistake, there are excellent web development tools around. We’ve really evolved from the days where you wrote pure HTML with vi or notepad. Back then, you carried around a handful of HTML tags in your head and marked up the text straight out your fingertips. Of course, mistakes happened but you could see these pretty quickly by viewing your page. Finding the problem wasn’t a big ask because the markup was linear – it was all just a continuous sequence of text, in order. Modern web sites are far more complex. Styles can be applied giving a consistent and aesthetic theme across all pages. Styles can cascade – where multiple individual style sheets all combine to give the overall effect – but with this extra power and flexibility comes much more difficulty in locating the root cause of any errors. And it’s not just page markup; add some JavaScript into the mix and you no longer have a linear, top-to-bottom flow through your page. It becomes hard to debug scripting problems, often requiring web pages to be reloaded over and over with lines added to output showing periodically that lines of code have been reached successfully. If you can relate to this situation, fret no more. Firebug puts unprecedented live debugging tools right in your hands. It is one of the most impressive Firefox add-ons and it makes jaws drop when Internet Explorer web designers see the power it offers. Like Firefox itself, Firebug is free and open source. It can be freely downloaded and its source code inspected or even modified, with changes contributed back to the project. Firebug offers a series of window panes and tab pages to let you analyse in depth the underlying HTML, CSS and JavaScript that make up a page. You can see at a glance everything that can be possibly known about any style in your page. If your CSS elements are lining up, you can inspect the margins, borders and sizes and figure out why. You can pause JavaScript at any point, inspect all the variables and then set it running again or even step through it line by line. These are pretty cool things, and some of its features are items you’d ordinarily not expect to find except in high-end expensive tools. The best is still yet to come. |
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