Really useful tool for people doing web development

[Dan Coutu]

I tend to do a lot of web development. Debugging can sometimes get
really challenging, particularly when trying to figure out what the
browser is actually doing behind the scenes. Trying to figure out why
css isn't working right, what's really going on with complex table
layout, how about that javascript that I just changed, the list goes on
and on.

I recently found a really slick developer's toolbar for firefox that is
so immensely useful that I had to tell people about it.

You can find the download for it (open source of course) here:

http://chrispederick.com/work/webdeveloper/

It is an extension to Firefox. When installed and enabled it provides an
additional toolbar that allows you to do all kinds of useful things.
Examples are:

- Cookie manipulation: examine cookies, disable them, set them
- CSS: disable different styles, read the entire css for a page,
interactively view the css for different page elements by pointing to
them, edit css on the fly, add a css file on the fly
- Forms: display form details, view form data, convert select tags to
text, remove max length limits
- Resize: you can resize the window to any size, zoom in and out
- Validation: validate the css, html, rss, links, WAI, accessibility
conformance

And a whole lot more that I didn't feel like spending the next ten
minutes typing up.

This little gem just saved me from hours of tearing my hair out.

While Microsoft does have a similar developer's toolbar for IE it has
much less capability than this Firefox toolbar (and of course it doesn't
work with Firefox!)

Dan