Thursday, March 29, 2007

Firefox Extensions for the Web

Working on web sites with a lot of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is easier with three Firefox extensions:

1. Firebug, which allows you to inspect the code on a page by a point-and-click interface; it's like "looking under the hood" of a web site, but instead of trying to figure out what CSS (and other code) applies to the item you are interested in, you just click on that part of the page to find out.

2. Web Developer allows you to use Firefox to analyze a web site, but I find it useful to understand the layout of a page, since it will colour-code the different sections.

3. ColorZilla is a simple tool that fulfills one function very well - if you ever customize a page for a client, then you may want to have a specific colour. Instead of trying to determine the hex HTML code for the colour, simply point and click on a site to find out.

4. Meebo in Firefox allows instant messaging within your browser, which facilitates virtual reference, but also work in general on web sites, since one can upload changes to a site using other tools and IM with co-workers.