While work and life always tend to get in the road, I’ve been plodding slowly along on the DOM Inspector, most recently I’ve been working on bug 255940. This involves removing the horrible dropdown box from the Box Model page and replacing it with a graphical representation (similar to the one found in Firebug). This will then be followed up by allowing people to change which measurement they are viewing in box model viewer.

I’ve also been working locally on a patch to provide some sort of hinting as to what type of property you are viewing in the Javascript object viewer, this basically involves using a list of default properties of each dom object (which I’m using from Firebug) but I think this is the sort of thing that could be standardised so that we aren’t duplicating this code, and it’s always up to date, as new elements are added (Video for example).

I have been busily working on the DOM Inspector, apart from bug 221934 I have also been working on a prototype to increase the usability of the CSS Style rules pane. I have opened bug 368783 to cover the work on it. I have also built an initial prototype which doesn’t have all of the features plugged into it, but should be good for people to comment on it’s accessibility and what people think about it.

Here is the prototype version.

Well after quite some time away from working on the DOM Inspector I have made some headway over the last couple of weeks and I’m ready to let the world see what I’ve done.

The major changes I’ve made here are to do with the DOM View, it has been changed to become far more similar to that of Firebug or the Safari DOM Inspector (which I’ve never used, I’m only repeating what I’ve been told). It’s a lot different from the old view, but having used it quite a bit over the last week, it is easy to use. The CSS based searching really changes the way you view documents, rather than browsing for them, it is very easy to just type where you want to go.

Anyway, I’d really like to hear what people have to say about it, there are obviously some performance issues, and there is broken functionality, but I think it is quite effective as a proof of concept.

Here’s the link.

Over the past couple of weeks I have been in discussions with Frank Hecker from the Mozilla Foundation regarding a grant for a UI review of the DOM Inspector. As this includes performing some user interviews of the DOMI, I have been doing some research of people who have blogged about it.

One of the standout points from this has been the amount of talk in blogs about Firebug. I’m extremely curious as to how many people have moved away from the DOMI completely, or if people are using it in conjunction with Firebug. I know personally I’ve been using Firebug alot but there is a bug in it preventing XMLHttpRequest’s working in XML documents, and unfortunately this is a show stopper for my development.