As I finish up ComicDish’s review for next Monday, here is a short article for all those comic creators out there who double as webdesigners. I’ve been building my own sites since I started my webcomic in 2004. I started with HTML, and this past year, moved to CSS. Anyone in that same transition having issues getting things to work, or simply trying to debug some CSS malfunction, if you have FireFox (which as a webdesigner you should be using anyways…) get the add-on Firebug.
Firebug is a live debugger/source code reader, among other things. When you open it in your browser, you have the website in question above top, a window with the source code below left, and a window with the stylesheet below right. You can make LIVE EDITS (that are not permanent except on YOUR screen) to fix things, test things, muck around, etc. If you hover on the source code area, that same area is highlighted on the website. This allows you to SEE margins, padding, and table or div dimensions.
This add-on cannot be recommended enough for webcomickers. Whether you’re using ComicPress or your own CMS, CSS or HTML, whether you’re a total coding amateur or even a professional, if you don’t have it, what are you waiting for? Work smart, not hard. ;)
Have a good weekend, folks! Thanks for reading.
March 21st, 2009 - 2:12 am
I must firmly disagree that Firefox is the only browser a web designer should use. As a web designer you have the right to use whatever browser you chose for your personal browsing, but you should have all four (five now, I guess?) major browsers installed for testing purposes. I have Firefox, Opera, IE6 on my computer, IE7 and Chrome on mom’s computer, and Safari installed for the purpose of testing websites for glitches. I use Opera for browsing (personal preferences, partially because I find Firefox to be too add-ons happy when I really just want a simple browser that minimalizes everything… which the customizability of Opera provides.) and all my browsers for coding, because everyone has their preferences and not everyone’s is Firefox.
Sounds like it could be a really useful add-on anyway. If I ever decide to branch off from my current template, maybe I’ll give it a go. I probably won’t be doing anything more than CSS color/image changes for a good while, though… and I do have some of those in mind, hopefully.
March 21st, 2009 - 1:55 pm
Yes! Firebug makes life as a web developer SO much easier.
As Tiana pointed out, we should all still test on all the browsers. I use Browser Shots to make cross-browser compatibility testing a little bit less painful.
If you’re tracking a tough IE-only bug, I’d recommend using the Firebug Lite. It’s a bit of a hassle to set-up, but visualizing divs has helped me various times in tracking down bugs. The last time I used it, it helped me track down a missing closing div tag =(.
March 21st, 2009 - 2:03 pm
Obviously I guess I wasn’t being clear in my writing again. *sigh* I never said people shouldn’t use other browsers, only that a webdesigner SHOULD be using Firefox. I personally test in multiple browsers, and that is indeed a necessity for anyone building a site. Few things are less professional-looking than a broken site, and the excuse “built for so-and-so browser *insert link to download that browser here*.”
Having been doing this for 5 years though, I honestly believe FF should a webdesigner’s MAIN browser for testing and building and debugging–and THEN you go back in a debug for other browsers. Why? Because FF is the most logical browser out there, and the simplest coding works.
March 21st, 2009 - 7:03 pm
I forgot what Firebug did and forgot about it…*smacks forehead*
Of course, most of my CSS issues lately have been in browsers other than Firefox, lol. (Luckily I overcame them… just the hard way…)
Yeah, the way FF renders things makes the most sense of every browser (with IE making the least sense until recently, and I think Chrome and Safari come in second for that), so I use it to browse and design in first. I used Safari to design a layout in the other week. Bad, time-consuming things ensued. Fun facts: I have IE8 (which has a mode to let you see how broken your sites are in its old versions – saved my butt today), Safari 4, Firefox 3, Opera 9.51, and Chrome on my PC to check things all-around. In addition to these, I also have uhh… SUNRISE and I think two other obscure browsers installed on my mac, and with my layouts I check with every one of these on both major OSes (because stuff randomly changes slightly between both versions of FF, for example…). It’s slightly amusing. Mostly infuriating, though. (Stuff renders better in Mac IE5 than PC IE6… but it still lags horribly.)
end tl;dr comment~
March 21st, 2009 - 9:33 pm
I’ve never even heard of Firebug *hangs head in shame*, even tho Firefox is my default browser (I go trigger happy with the java script blocker). Sounds like a useful tool though I’m gonna check it out.