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Microsoft Issues IE Developer Toolbar

By Ed Oswald, BetaNews

September 19, 2005, 11:56 AM

Microsoft over the weekend released a beta version of its developer toolbar first mentioned at PDC 2005 last week. At a session detailing what's new within Internet Explorer 7, IE lead Chris Wilson said the toolbar was intended to assist developers in creating Web pages that adhere to standards.

The toolbar works on Internet Explorer 6 and above on Windows XP and Vista operating systems. The toolbar will allow developers to perform such functions as validating CSS and HTML code, and previewing how pages appear in various screen resolutions. No release date was given for a final version. The toolbar beta can be downloaded from FileForum.

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By indoguys

posted Sep 19, 2005 - 10:06 PM

I tried the same kind of toolbar within Firefox ( http://chrispederick.com/work/firefox/webdeveloper/ )and happy to see IE has one too now. It makes life a bit easier while designing web pages. Tough I have so my own ideas bout 'standards'. To me IE is sure a kind of standard browser as it has the biggest market share, far behind others like Firefox, Opera, Netscape etc. Choosen of course by the customer as their favorite browser. With all standards and much more to come in the future I don;t care so much how the code underneath a page is done as I care how the end result is on my screen, within IE, within Forefox etc. And even CSS for example is quite ok as developer to work with to make life a bit easier esp. with big projects however the consumer doesn't care about these kind of things. Try to validate web pages from the big brothers and about 90% or so fails the test. Still their webs running smooth as end result. Even this page while reading: 76 errors... Failed validation, 76 errors
Address:
Modified: Tue Sep 20 02:05:01 2005
Server: Apache/1.3.33 (Unix) PHP/4.3.11
Size: (undefined)
Content-Type: text/html

Score: 0

By vistaguru

posted Sep 19, 2005 - 2:50 PM

The toolbar does not work on Vista. If you install it, you can not login back to OS. Please correct the news item, also the download page for the toolbar suggests only XP/2003. For more information about the problems of the toolbar on VIsta, check:

http://www.msvistablog.n...ent.php?comment.news.45

Score: 0

By headfog

posted Sep 19, 2005 - 1:41 PM

I'm confused. It's already been noted that IE7 doesn't adhere completely to standards. MS even said it wouldn't. So a toolbar to help code to standards seems counterintuitive and contradictory to what IE7 supports.

Score: 0

By BlinkMM182

edited Sep 19, 2005 - 4:35 PM

Obviously you are not paying attention, unintelligent or a troll. They said IE7 would not pass the acid 2 test...which by the way is a test that looks for error correction, not a real standards test. (Does any offical released browser pass it...not that I know of) IE7 will support everything through CSS 2.1. Surprising to many they are working on making IE follow better standards. Maybe you should read the actual blog at
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie and get educated.

Score: 0

By wincement

posted Sep 19, 2005 - 3:13 PM

Agreed. But hopefully this will mean that they WILL adhere (or at least try) to standards in future releases of IE.

Score: 0

By wincement

posted Sep 19, 2005 - 1:30 PM

Very very nice tool. Took you long enough MS, but it's nice.

These are the features that I really like:

-It has features to disable browser capabilities to see how the page will render in older browsers.

-It has the ability to show class and id information.

-It has the ability to visually outline all tags (table, div, span, etc...).

-The validate buttons take you directly to THE standard validators. For instance, the Validate HTML button takes you directly to the W3C HTML validation results for your page. Same with CSS, etc...

-It allows you to view the page as it would be displayed at other resolutions. Now instead of guessing how much screen real-estate a user with an smaller monitor might have, you can see it in real-time.

All in all, I think it's a fantastic tool for design troubleshooting.