Inspect Your Pages in IE
Hi my name is Markus Mielke and I am a Program Manager working with Chris Wilson on CSS and platform support. Today, I would like to talk about DOM Inspectors for IE.
For analyzing web pages and drilling down into problems on a page it becomes more and more important to have a DOM Inspector handy. Not a full fledged debugger but something quick that allows a user to explore their HTML document and understand everything going on with a specific element. For example, a window will display a tree view of the document. As the user clicks in the tree view, the corresponding element in the document will be outlined. Next to the tree view will be detailed information about the element – attributes set, styles etc. FireFox, for example, enables a DOM inspector at install time. Since IE does not have an inspector natively integrated I hear a lot of rumblings in the community expressing a need for a DOM inspector in IE.
The truth is that there already are a wide variety of DOM Inspectors out for IE. One of our best kept secrets is our extensibility story that enables 3rd parties to build rich add-ons on top of IE (go check out marketplace). One of the obvious drawbacks is that these add-ons are harder to discover than if they would come in the box. On the other hand they provide the freedom to choose the one that fits your needs best. Go test them out for yourselves and be the judge!
