I have come across a couple of really useful Firefox extensions aside from the excellent web developer extension which I wanted to share with the community.

The first is called View Rendered Source Chart, which renders the HTML source in a way that is very easy to visually see the nesting.

The second is one called View Formatted Source, and not only shows your HTML source in a way where you can collapse nested tags, but when set to inline mode, shows you the major divisions within your document, and clicking on “source” for that division brings up just the HTML for that division. Finally, mousing over tags in the source view shows you what styles currently apply to that tag, and where in the CSS file the styles are located.

Disclaimer: this piece (as well as this blog in general) is personal opinion and not endorsed by or representative of my employer.

I just came back from a conference where I was presenting on Web 2.0. A related discussion around Microsoft’s foray into the Rich Internet Application space ensued, and as part of that discussion, I was sent a link to an interesting Information Week article that talks directly to our discussion. The article talks about MS and Eclipse-based development environments for web applications, and one quote in the article demonstrated one of my major concerns perfectly: