Ajaxian has a nice little thread on IE DOM toolbars. Originally meant as an intro for DOM Helper, it kind of evolved to incorporate a couple other toolbars. Sure, we all use the FireBug and Web Developer extensions for FireFox, but what do we use for IE?

I personally use Microsoft’s Developer Toolbar, which I was only fairly happy with, mostly due to it’s kind of unintuitive UI. (Yes, floating tooltips are easy to make in .NET applications. No, they are not good as the primary means to communicate data). The Ajaxian article finally prompted me to figure out how to modify the DOM in the IE toolbar (because, apparently, it’s always been possible if hidden). Click on (or otherwise select) an element, and use the middle pane to add and modify attributes.

I’ve been trying to use the right pane, which, to me, seems like it should work (but is apparently only meant to show your element’s current style, which is pretty valuable nonetheless). I especially like how the attribute names are a big, giant dropdown so that you can see them all. With that middle pane, IE’s toolbar is better then the Web Developer extension (more robust), yet still not as great as FireBug. Hopefully, it works in IE 7 right off the bat.

technorati tags:developer, toolbars, ajaxian

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 18th, 2006 at 11:53 am and is filed under css, dhtml, javascript. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.