I am currently working on the web site for an upcoming project. It’s difficult to express how impressed I am with Hobo, it is one of the most well-conceived pieces of software that I have dealt with. However, the topic of today’s post is a few new web development tools that I have recently discovered (although the apparently have all been available for a while).
XRAY is a bookmarklet that lets you inspect the properties of any element on the page by opening a floating palette that displays the element type, id, class, position, size, border, margin, and padding of any element you click on. It also displays the element’s inheritance hierarchy.
MRI opens a similar floating window and has an input field where you can enter a CSS selector. When you click the MRI button, MRI highlights the elements on the page that are matched by the selector. MRI also works the other way around. Click anywhere on the page and it will suggest CSS selectors for the element you clicked on.
These are both nice additions to the Firebug development tools for Firefox. Another Firefox plugin that comes in handy is the Lorem Ipsum dummy text generator Dummy Lipsum.
On a side note: At more or less the same time that we started developing a new web site for BEK, moving from Zope to Ruby On Rails, the University of Bergen started developing their new web site using Zope. Two years and 15 million kroners later (approx 2.8 mill US$) they are abandoning the system, describing it as a dead end road. Makes me feel that we have at least occasionally made the right choices at BEK…
