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---- IE Developer Toolbar

Hester - 11:12 am on Feb 1, 2006 (gmt 0)


One here for experts like SuzyUK. Check out the IE Developer Toolbar! It's linked on the same page as the IE7 Beta 2 download (see separate WebmasterWorld thread [webmasterworld.com...] ). In many ways, it is a rip-off, er I mean, similar product to Firefox's outstanding Web Developer toolbar by Chris Pederick. (If you haven't seen or used that, hunt it down.) Both offer incredible features to assist the designer. For IE6+, these include:

  • DOM Explorer - works like Mozilla's DOM Inspector. Enables you to see a tree of all elements on a page. Open this up to find full information on each element or attribute.

    What I like is that this goes way beyond what you put in your web code. You can see masses of extra information that IE uses to make up the page. Including... drum roll...

    hasLayout!

    That mysterious property that can affect layouts. What I noticed is that all the elements I looked at on a typical web page had this set to -1. So I assume this means hasLayout is "off"?

    This alone could be extremely useful in tracking down layout bugs!

    The DOM Explorer also allows you to add attributes to the page. It offers a huge list of these - you can even add zoom!

    Back to the rest of the toolbar...

  • You can hover over elements to outline them

  • Find elements by tag, or class, ID or name

  • Disable cache, images, cookies, script or the popup blocker

  • Show information on the page such as class, ID, link paths, tab indexes or access keys

  • Outline table cells, tables, divs, images or any custom element. Also positioned elements of the types relative, absolute, fixed or floated.

  • Validate the page for various standards

  • Show image dimensions, file sizes, paths, ALT text, or generate a report listing all images

  • Resize the window to a variety of common sizes

  • Clear things like the cache just for the domain you're on

  • There's also a Ruler, but it doesn't work for me. Well, this is still a beta program, so omissions are to be expected. It also stopped working at one point, (nothing was being outlined), but eventually I got it to work again somehow.

    So do yourselves a favour and download this excellent tool. Firefox ain't the only player in town with such a useful tool in its box of tricks.

    It works with IE6 too, not just IE7.

    [edited by: engine at 12:31 pm (utc) on Feb. 1, 2006]
    [edit reason] added beta link [/edit]

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