Sitepoint: DHTML & CSS Blog: Stylish Scripting

• FireBug? The King of Firefox Validators
  

  Being 2006 and all, you would think it should be difficult to get excited about markup validation extensions for Firefox. Nevertheless, I have to say Joe Hewitt’s new offering Firebug has to be the most impressive new developer extension I’ve seen for a while (ok,ok,.. since IETab).

  The Auto Validator:

  In its inactive mode Firebug’s auto-validator is completely invisible on valid pages, and displays a simple ‘error counter’ in your status bar on pages with errors. Definitely less is more. Clicking the counter folds out a feedback toolbar detailing each error.

  Although the error description is certainly handy enough, the killer feature for me is the ability to click on an error location and have it instantly highlighted in the source—especially useful for subtle problems like a missing ‘;’ or an extra ‘,’ in CSS.

  The best endorsement I can give for this tool is I’ve actually found myself fixing the little niggling validation problems simply because they’re just so effortless to identify now.

  The Element Inspector:

  Firebug’s Element Inspector is similar in many ways to Nicolas Moreau’s excellent ‘Inspect Element’ extension but slightly more elegant in operation. Activating it lets you highlight any visible page element with your cursor. Selecting an element plucks it to the toolbar below and gives you instant access to it’s HTML source, the CSS rules directly targetting it, a ‘box model’ view of the attributes effecting it, and a DOM-level view of the object—all without ever losing sight of the page you’re working on.

  Very fast. Very slick.

  As I said, not much that hasn’t been done before, but I doubt it’s ever been tied together so usefully. Check it out.

AllWebMenus is a dhtml/javascript menu builder for web site navigation that requires absolutely no DHTML or Javascript experience from you. It creates cross-browser, popup or drop down menus that work alike in all browsers supporting DHTML (like Netscape Navigator, Internet Explorer, Opera, Mozilla, Konqueror, Safari and more).

A javascript menu can be designed with a simple, tree-like approach. You can then fully customize it by using the Properties Pane or by choosing a predefined appearance from the Style Gallery. It can be either vertical or horizontal (popup or drop down menu), it can be movable, stay visible while scrolling, contain static or animated images, borders, colors and much more!

Once everything is set, you can compile and link your menu to your web pages in a fast and easy manner, without any code involved!

AllWebMenus will save you a significant amount of time and effort required to fully understand Dynamic HTML and Javascript code capable to support all DHTML-enabled browsers!

read more about AllWebMenus

AllWebMenus Tips...

Once you have compiled and linked your menu to your pages, you will need to upload the files to your web server.

The files created by AllWebMenus during the compilation phase are:

./menuname.js
./awmmenupath.gif
./awmdata/ (folder)
./awmdata/dot.gif
./awmdata/[all awmlibX.js files]
./awmdata/[all image files used by the menu]

where:

./ denotes the current directory

menuname denotes the name you have chosen for the menu when you compiled

All those files have to be uploaded to your web server using your favorite FTP tool. Make sure that the directory structure is kept exactly the same as is displayed here and also pay careful attention in order to keep the case of the files when they are uploaded. You have also to make sure that the files are placed in the same location relative to your HTML files as they are locally, in order for the directories that were automatically set in the AllWebMenus linking section to point to the right structure on your web server.