DOM Inspector: Sliced Bread, Eat Your Heart Out
Posted on 2006-03-09 (Updated on 2019-01-24)
It's been a rough week, but my overdue discovery of the DOM Inspector built-into Firefox may have just made my day.
For those of you still struggling with the cryptic subtle ways of the HTML DOM, this is for you. I've recently been trying to come up with an accessible, unobtrusive collapse/expand script that takes advantage of the DOM structure to do it's dirty work. After dabbling with recursive Javascript functions, I soon realized that I was in so far over my head that I could barely see daylight. After pushing the script aside for a few days, I decided to bring up the DOM inspector to see if it would shed any light into the problems I was encountering.
After fiddling with a few of the displays, I hit the jackpot: the "Object: Javascript Object" view. Spread out before me were all the options and attributes I was trying to utilize. FirstChild properties, nodeType attributes, it was all there. All waiting for me to utilize like a magical bag of reagents.
Instead of writing the script, I instantly blogged about it. Of course. But now it's back to work, and hopefully I will have an accessible script to show soon. Stay tuned, kids.
Tags: browsers javascript