IE7: tricks/plugins for seeing all the html on a page? - asp.net

I'm working on an app that's sort of a bastardization of old and new tech (ASP/ASP.NET). It's all running in IE7. I'd like to be able to right click, View Source and actually see all the html that I'm seeing with my eyes. For example, I have a bit of text in the middle of the page that's in a table. I right click directly on that bit of text and "View Source" and the text isn't in the HTML that I'm looking at. There's no line break or special characters. It's a single piece of text like ABC123. Yet ABC123 isn't in the HTML that I see when I view source.
Is this just something that I'm stuck with? If not, how can I get to the HTML that I want? The app won't run in FF so Firebug is out of the question. I've tried a few developer toolbars for IE but have found them to be flawed at best, not working at worst. It's just very frustrating; I want to make a little change to a style of a TD and I have to go through way too much work just to see if I like it (because of the complex way that the HTML is generated).

When developing in IE I use the IE developers toolbar:
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=18359
It will allow you to see rendered HTML on the page, and allow you to drill down and select specific elements that you want to see. There are various highlighting functions, and you can trace styles back to their source.
It's not the be-all and end-all of developer toolbars, but for those times I can't use Firefox / Firebug it does the job over other solutions I have tried

IE7 Pro gives a right click and "View Generated Source" option.

Some ideas:
Firebug Lite
Use IE8 (with its developer tools) in compatibility mode.
MS created a developer toolbar for IE7 (sort of like Web Developer FF extension): http://www.microsoft.com/downloadS/details.aspx?familyid=E59C3964-672D-4511-BB3E-2D5E1DB91038&displaylang=en
Temporarily add a link with an onclick handler to dump document.outerHtml into a <pre>

Related

How to get a full CSS code for an element

I am new to CSS and just learned how to inspect an element. My question is how can i get a whole/full CSS code for an element?
Let say i need a full css code for a form (https://townends.co.uk) please see search form on homepage, How can i get that whole code for this module?
Thanks in advance.
A
Right click -> View Page Source from site.
Then find "< link rel='stylesheet'" keyword. You have all the css files associated.
Sounds like you could use the dev tools in your browser. They can be super helpful for seeing what actually is affecting different elements in your site. depending on which browser you are using the shortcut for it is different. My favorite suite of in-browser dev tools is in Firefox(check out the developers edition of Firefox as well).
From within the dev tools of Firefox you can click on the arrow pointing into a box from the highest level tabs. This allows you to hover over any element on your page and display the classes and ids affecting the element as well as the rules being used on the element in the dev tool partition of your screen at the bottom. There are many more useful tools in browsers so explore it a little and it will probably improve your productivity.

How to learn why an HTML element is disabled

I'm trying to use an open source HTML5 file uploader snippet in one of my pages, and have put (I believe) all the correct javascript in place.
However, when the page loads I see the 'choose file..' button along with the text box that shows the path to the file on my hard drive, and they're both greyed out.
In looking through the Google and FireFox development tools I can't see why this would be; the CSS involved is quite involved and I can't tell easily whether there's a block display of hidden in there, or whether something else is disabled.
Nothing's jumping out. Are there HTML or CSS inspectors that can help figure out why HTML element X is disabled?
There should be a disabled attribute set. You can try two things:
Check the HTML by viewing the source code. This is the HTML rendered before JavaScript.
Check the Dev Tools and look for a disabled attribute. Then check your JavaScript.
It is hard to debug this remotely but this should send you on your way.

Which is the Firefox tool corresponding to Chrome->Web Developer ->Styles?

When using Selenium, I found the Chrome -> Web Developer -Styles window very useful in getting CSS names of web controls.
I could right click on a web control and would get the CSS name for that control. This helped me avoid using XPath.
However, the in-house web application has blocked right click, so I am not able to use that facility any more. However I can still use Firebug to show me the XPath of a control since it works if I click the arrow in Firebug toolbar, which then displays XPath of every control that I hover.
So, the question is - Does Firefox addons have a corresponding CSS identifier tool?
Or
Is there a way around the right click block in Chrome? (For some reason Chrome used to guess or build the CSS name quite accurately which I did not find in Firefox.)
The HTML panel of Firebug has a Styles side panel, where you can get all the applied styles for the selected element.

Crystal report is making the menu for master page disappear

For some reason whenever I go to the page of my website that has the crystal report on it my main navigation bar disappears. Here is what the header for the site (with the navigation menu) is suppose to look like:
and here is what it looks like when there is a report on the page:
Could someone tell me what is causing this and how I can fix it?
I'm using master page for the header by the way.
Greener, the Crystal Report viewer is a dynamic HTML representation of the report. It combines JavaScript, HTML and CSS (duh, what doesn't) to represent your report on the webpage. The toolbars are powered by JavaScript calls to .JS that is linked in when the CrystalReportViewer control is rendered to your page.
My point is, all of this introduces a LOT of stuff that can conflict with your existing page. In particular JavaScript errors can occur (which can cause certain things to stop rendering) OR CSS the report uses happens to apply styles you never intended to have applied to objects in your page.
I highly recommend installing the Web Developer toolbar and/or FireBug to FireFox, IE, or whatever browser they are offered on these days. FireFox's implementation of those is quite good in my experience.
When the page loads you can use the 'CSS' menu of the Web Developer toolbar to actually disable some or ALL the styles applied to the page. If disabling Crystal related styles (or all) makes your missing toolbar appear, then it's probably a conflict in your CSS. A front end developer would know to adjust the styles (i.e. add the !important directive to a style, change class/id names, etc.) to address this.
Alternatively, FireBug may be reporting JavaScript errors (heck, even FireFox can show these in the console) which could indicate a problem that prevents the completion of rendering your toolbar.
An outside possibility is that the report itself contains mark-up. For example, if you had certain fields in the report contain HTML that happened to be rendered by the browser, this could create an open div tag, css styles and even JavaScript that would do all the stuff I explained above.
I hope this narrows it down for you. Happy troubleshooting!
I was having the same issue and after hours of searching I finally resolved it... check this out... http://scn.sap.com/thread/1926659
In the crystalreportviewer css file, I adjusted the div class = clear and changed the height attribute and disabled overflow:hidden. Hopefully, that works for you. Good luck!
I found the solution after searching on the web and is a quite simple.
On the Site Master, change the Name for all the places you have the style "clear" for example "clear1" and change it too en the site.css with that name.
The problem is for the conflic with the namespaces with Crystal Report css.
Hope this help.

Full on-the-fly stylesheet editing in Chrome or Safari

I hate Firefox, I really do, but as a web developer I'm chained to it b/c of the robust set of tools that Firebug offers. Recently Chrome and Safari's inspection tools allowed users to edit full chunks structural code (in a very buggy manner), but you still can't edit full stylesheets. Usually when someone brings this up, Chrome and Safari developers say "BUT YOU CAN EDIT CSS," and that's true, to an extent. You can edit CSS property-by-property (which takes forever if you have a lot of changes) in both browsers, but there is no way to see the full computed stylesheet, make edits within it, and immediately see the results. To date, only a full install of Firebug on Firefox allows you to do this.
Has there been any momentum in either of the Chrome or Safari camps to build a plugin to match this unparalleled function? Cheap plugins that allow you to insert CSS into the page are not the answer. It's really simple:
Have a list with the current stylesheets that are being referenced
Choose the one you want to edit, and click an edit button
See all the code in the stylesheet
Make changes and see them reflected on the page immediately
Is it really that hard to build something that does this? I think it must be, b/c why else would the developer communities of two browsers completely ignore it? If there's something out there that now offers this capability, I'd love to hear it; otherwise, maybe someone will step up to the plate and develop it for either Chrome or Safari. It seems like the guys who developed the CSS Edit app would be all over this.
Thanks to you I found it!
The Live Stylesheets extension for Chrome is what you are looking for. Be sure to restart Chrome after installation to use it.
You can edit external stylesheets in Chrome DevTools, too (since Chrome 15 or so). Just double-click the stylesheet contents in the Resources panel (or click the "Edit" button below), edit, Ctrl-S to commit a new revision, Esc to cancel editing. And it updates your page as you type!
You can edit your CSS files directly on Chrome without relying on any extension.
Here is how: Edit CSS files on the fly using Chrome DevTools
A different way to access it:
right click the page, select inspect
on the DevTools, click on "Sources"
locate the css on the "Network" pane and click it
change the css and save it ( by pressing ctrl+s )

Resources