I’m very pleased to announce the launch of CodeBurner Version 1.5. More than an update, it’s three (count ’em, three!) new builds as well — extending the CodeBurner family to include an Opera widget, a Mac OS X Dashboard widget, and a standalone app built on the Adobe AIR platform. You can download them here:
Perhaps the most significant new feature is the addition of a new CSS view. It works in tandem with the DOM view, to provide a complete breakdown of all the style sheets used on the DOM view page. You can drill into each style sheet and obtain information about its rules, properties, and selectors. Furthermore, when you perform a “DOM selection search,” the results now include information about properties and selectors as well.
Adding this functionality to the Firefox and Firebug versions was relatively straightforward, if quite involved. Data made available by the DOM utilities class provides information about the CSS DOM, and it’s what powers the CSS inspection in DOM Inspector and Firebug.
However, no such functionality exists outside of Firefox — extending this capability to other versions meant writing a whole new utilities class, in order to analyze and extract the necessary information from a document’s style sheets collection! No small feat, I can tell you. It provides functionality, such as the ability to return a list of properties that apply to an arbitrary element, which the new versions use for their selection search.
CodeBurner now includes CSS selectors and at-rules in all its searches, in addition to the CSS properties, HTML elements, and attributes information it had before. For all the code output and code examples, you now have full syntax highlighting (with user-configurable colors in the Firefox version). As you’d expect, there’s also a range of smaller bug fixes and stability enhancements, including a new on-demand loading technique for the Firefox and Firebug versions; this latter feature helps reduce the extension’s memory footprint when it’s inactive.
In order to keep the version numbers uniform, all the new builds come straight in at Version 1.5; but there’s no need to worry — you’re still up to speed! The version numbers simply reflect the fact that all these new builds have a comparable feature set to the primary Firefox and Firebug versions, both of which have naturally reached 1.5.
So there you have it — more choice than ever, giving you the HTML and CSS reference data you need in whatever format is most convenient for you, be it a browser-based development tool, a browser widget, dashboard widget, or a standalone desktop application.
And if you’re yet to be impressed, you should see what’s coming in Version 2! (Sorry, you’re just going to have to wait.)
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James EdwardsJames is a freelance web developer based in the UK, specialising in JavaScript application development and building accessible websites. With more than a decade's professional experience, he is a published author, a frequent blogger and speaker, and an outspoken advocate of standards-based development.
