Steve Chipman over at SlayerOffice has released version 2.0 of his Mouseover DOM Inspector bookmarklet. The MODI, as he calls it, “allows you to view and manipulate the DOM of a web page simply by mousing around the document”. Tools by web developers, for web developers. We can’t be that far from a complete Dreamweaver-a-like editor that runs completely inside the browser, what with tools like these around. Someone ought to do that; not an in-browser rich-text editor, but a proper editing suite. About the only thing you can’t really do is drag-and-drop into the browser window to insert an image or text, and I think that (although that’s probably the best way to do it) we could live without it. Build such an editor and the world will be happy, I think; don’t use XUL or Browser Helper Objects, no “installation” routine, no extensions, just the DOM. It would be possible, and it would be really cool as long as everyone could use it. It might even avoid the badly-crafted HTML that tools tend to produce.
Stuart Langridge and Tony Steidler-Dennison
