WebFund 2013W: Web Develper Tools

Tutorial Note

This tutorial is optional. Your primary task is to work on your proposal which is due February 1st. Use this time to talk with your TA. In particular, discuss the scope of your project and your chosen milestones.

Browser Developer Tools

Both Firefox and Chrome offer very good built-in tools for examining and debugging web applications.

• To start the Firefox Web Developer toolbar, go to Tools->Web Developer->Developer Toolbar.
• To start the Chrome Developer Tools, go to the wrench menu, then select Tools -> Developer tools.

Note that newer versions of these browsers tend to have better versions of these tools.

Tasks

In this tutorial, use one or both of these toolbars to examine the following pages:

• Anil's home page
• Google's front page
• Amazon's front page
• Google Maps
• Bing Maps
• The Long, Strange Trip of Dock Ellis

For each of these pages, look at:

1. The page source
2. HTML/CSS elements
3. embedded JavaScript
4. rendering errors

How did you learn about each?

Resources

Firefox:

• How To Use Firefox’s Web Developer Tools (out of date but still useful guide)
• Firefox 3D view of pages
• Firefox Command Line
• Talk from October 2012 on Firefox Developer Tools by Joe Walker

Chrome:

• tutorial and resources from developers.google.com
• short video tutorials from phpacademy.org

If you find other good ones please add to the above list or ask a TA to do so for you.