Huddled Masses

So, you’re a web developer, and you’ve been using the Web Developer toolbar along with the DOM Inspector in Firefox, and wishing that such a thing was available for Internet Explorer? (Well, there were such things available, but they’re from third parties, and they cost money, and now…) You’re in luck!

Microsoft just released the Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar Beta which provides several features for deeply exploring and understanding Web pages as rendered in IE.

• Explore and modify the document object model (DOM) of a web page.
• Locate and select specific elements on a web page through a variety of techniques.
• Selectively disable Internet Explorer settings.
• View HTML object class names, ID’s, and details such as link paths, tab index values, and access keys.
• Outline tables, table cells, images, or selected tags.
• Validate HTML, CSS, WAI, and RSS web feed links.
• Display image dimensions, file sizes, path information, and alternate (ALT) text.
• Immediately resize the browser window to 800×600 or a custom size.
• Selectively clear the browser cache and saved cookies. Choose from all objects or those associated with a given domain.
• Choose direct links to W3C specification references, the Internet Explorer team weblog (blog), and other resources.

• Display a fully featured design ruler to help accurately align objects on your pages.

You should deffinitely check this out if you design web-pages, it’s pretty handy. Oh, and if you’ve never played with Fiddler (it’s browser independent), it’s a really cool tool for HTTP debugging (notice I said HTTP, not HTML). It (temporarily) serves as a proxy for all your web traffic, so you can not only see all requests as they go out, you can set breakpoints, and even tweak requests so you can see in IE the results of identifying as Firefox, or vice-versa. There’s a good tutorial for using Fiddler in the MSDN

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