Tag: webpage

An editable box model view in the devtools

This week the whole devtools group has been sequestered in Mozilla’s Portland office having one of our regular meet-ups. As always it’s been a fantastically productive week with lots of demos to show for it. I’ll be writing a longer write-up later but I wanted to post about what I played with over the week.

My wife does the odd bit of web development on the side. For a long time she was a loyal Firebug user and a while ago I asked her what she thought of Firefox’s built in devtools. She quickly pointed out a couple of features that Firebug had that Firefox did not. As I was leaving for this week I mentioned I’d be with the devtools group and she asked whether her features had been fixed yet. It turns out that colour swatches had been but the box model still wasn’t editable. So I figured I could earn myself some brownie points by hacking on that this week.

The goal here is to be able to inspect an element on the page, pull up the box model and be able to quickly play with the margins, borders and padding to tweak the positioning until it looks right. Then armed with the right values you can go update your stylesheets. It saves a lot of trial and error with positioning.

It turned out to be relatively simple to implement a pretty full version. The feature allows you to click one of the box model values and type whatever value you like, in any CSS unit you prefer. If the size had been set in the stylesheet in some specific unit then that is what appears in the input box for you to change. Better yet as you type numbers the element updates in the page on the fly and you can use the arrow keys to increase/decrease the value until you’re happy. It’s a really natural way to play with the element’s position.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HlmY4p76Cc

The changes made appear on the element so you can find them in the rule view pretty easily. This patch is based on an updated version of the box model view which is why it looks so different to existing Firefox, all my work does is make the numbers editable.

I actually completed this so quickly that I decided to take this one step further. One thing missing from the box model display is information about border colours. So I added some colour swatches for each border and made them editable with the regular devtools colour picker.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxh0BKC5Xns

Both of these patches are pretty much complete but they’ll have to wait for the new box model highlighter to be complete before they can be reviewed and land.

Hacking on Tilt

Tilt, or 3D view as it is known in Firefox, is an awesome visual tool that really lets you see the structure of a webpage. It shows you just how deep your tag hierarchy goes which might give signs of your page being too complex or even help you spot errors in your markup that you wouldn’t otherwise notice. But what if it could do more? What if there were different ways to visualise the same page? What if even web developers could create their own visualisations?

I’ve had this idea knocking around in my head for a while now and the devtools work week was the perfect time to hack on it. Here are some results, click through for larger images:

Normal 3D view
Normal 3D view
Only give depth to links
Only give depth to links
Only give depth to links going off-site
Only give depth to links going off-site
Only give depth to elements that have a different style on hover
Only give depth to elements that have a different style on hover

This is all achieved with some changes to Firefox itself to make Tilt handle more generic visualisations along with an extension that then overrides Tilt’s default visualisation. Because the extension has access to everything Firefox knows about the webpage it can use some interested sources of data about the page, including those not found in the DOM. This one I particularly like, it makes the element’s depth proportional to the number of attached DOM event listeners:

Give depth to elements based on the number of attached event listeners
Give depth to elements based on the number of attached event listeners

Just look at that search box, and what’s up with the two buttons having different height?

The code just calls a JS function to get the height for each element displayed in 3D view. It’s really easy to use DOM functions to highlight different things about the elements and while I think some of the examples I made are interesting I think it will be more interesting to just let web-devs come up with and share their own visualisations. To that end I also demoed using scratchpad to write whatever function you like to control the visualisation. You can see a screencast of it in action.

Something that struck me towards the end of the week is that it could be awesome to pair this up with external sources of data like analytics. What about being able to view your page with links given depth proportional to how often users click them? Seems like an awesome way to really understand where your users are going and maybe why.

I’m hoping to get the changes to Firefox landed soon maybe with an additional patch to properly support extensibility of Tilt, right now the extension works by replacing a function in a JSM which is pretty hacky, but it wouldn’t be difficult to make it nicer than that. After that I’ll be interested to see what visualisation ideas others come up with.