An exCSSively useful menuIn recent times, the Poorhouse has gained a new favourite extension for Firefox. The Web Developer extension, which works on Firefox, Flock, Mozilla and Seamonkey web browsers contains far-too-numerous to list that aid the creation of one's own pages, and dare it be suggested the deconstruction of other people's pages - all in the name of research naturally.

A few favourite features include the ability to immediately disable various features of pages such as redirects, Javascript etc., validate any code under various standards, manipulate forms and images, resize the browser window to standard screen-size resolutions and a whole host of information gathering / layout visualising options.

Possibly the Poorhouse's favourite features are the CSS tools. One can remove all the CSS from a page instantly (handy for instance on the badly coded pages you see now and then where you can't actually read all the text due to silly layouts or crazy colours), change the stylesheet to one of your own or simply view the CSS as is. The ultra-best feature has to be the live CSS editor. This opens a panel to the left of the webpage displaying the CSS relating to the page. You can make changes to that panel (i.e. rewrite the CSS) and the alterations are immediately shown on the main web page. For people like the Poorhouse whose best methodology for playing with these newish-fangled toys is inevitably trial and error, this saves a huge amount of faffing around making tiny changes, reuploading, refreshing and so forth. Of course if you're paid by the hour there is no need to mention these wonderful developments to the client.