Ayman Hourieh

The main news piece for day 2 in the Firefox Summit 2008 is that everyone is now trapped in the small town of Whistler after that a rock slide cut off the highway that connects Whistler with Vancouver. Fortunately, nobody was injured because of this. However, clearing the massive boulders that are blocking the highway will take 5 days according to official sources. Since the summit ends this Thursday, most attendants need to go to the Vancouver Airport on Friday to catch flights to their home countries. The cause of this rock slide is unclear at the moment, but there are people in the summit who are speculating whether a company whose name starts with an 'M' is behind all of this. A bug was filed in Bugzilla to track the issue, and some of the currently-proposed solutions involve riding bears, taking boats, or taking helicopters. In reality however, we will most likely end up going through a different route that takes around 8 hours in a bus.

The Firefox Summit 2008 started today in the city of Whistler, BC, Canada. Around 400 contributors to the Mozilla project gathered to meet, share thoughts and discuss the 3.0 release of Firefox and plan for the next releases. I'm attending the summit as the Arabic localizer. I will post a daily highlight of the summit on my blog, so let's start with day one.

I wrote two CSS debugging bookmarklets to ease the pain of HTML/CSS development under Internet Explorer. They mimic two commonly-used features in the Web Developer extension for Firefox. The first bookmarklet outlines block-level elements, and the second displays ID and class information. Although that such functionality already exists in Web Developer and other bookmarklets, I couldn't find anything that is compatible with Internet Explorer and works offline (What I found were bookmarklets that relied on including remote stylesheets).

To test a bookmarklet, simply click its link. To use it, drag and drop the link to your Links/Bookmarks toolbar, and press the resulting button when you want to activate the associated functionality. These bookmarklets were tested in Firefox 1.5, Internet Explorer 6.0 and Opera 8.5. I haven't had the chance yet to test with KHTML/Safari, but I think they should work because the code is standards-complaint.

• Outline block elements
• Display ID and class information

Anyone who's worked with HTML/CSS for a while knows that Internet Explorer support for standards is lacking to say the least. It has many obscure bugs and compatibility issues. Firefox is my platform of choice for web development because of its compliance with standards and the plethora of development and debugging tools and extensions available (most notably Web Developer and FireBug). Once coding is finished under Firefox, I validate the code and test with other browsers (IE, KHTML/Safari and Opera). Most of the time the code works in Opera and KHTML without any issues; however, IE often produces problems, and while working around them, I used to wish I had Web Developer's features for IE. Now I have these bookmarklets. They took me about 5 minutes to write and test under Firefox, but IE silently failed to produce the desired results until I did another hour of work. I adopted Web Developer's styles for outlined elements and ID/class information for consistency. And now I'm sharing them here hoping that others will find them useful as well.