If you do web development, you know what Firebug is. If you’re shaking your head no, stop reading, go download this Firefox add-on and don’t ever tell anyone that you didn’t know what this was. Anyway, a new plugin (FireScope) for Firebug is available that acts as a reference utility so if you need to look up a CSS style and see which browsers support it, you can. Right now the information it provides isn’t all that impressive — it doesn’t even tell you the possible values for a property without leaving Firebug –, but it’s still useful if you just need to know the syntax or usage of a particular CSS property or HTML tag.
What would be really great is if the site that FireScope points to, http://reference.sitepoint.com/, or really any site that then intergrates with Forebug could become “the” go-to resource for questions about HTML, CSS and JavaScript semantics. I’m okay with all three technologies, but I still have questions about why something doesn’t work in a particular browser or what are the possible values of something. This usually means a Google search that provides good results if it’s a simple question and pretty bad results if it’s a hard question (i.e. “Why doesn’t this show up right in IE 6 and how do I work around it?”).
I know the collective knowledge of the internet has answers to a lot of these questions. Since Firebug has become a standard web development tool, it has gotten a lot of attention and a lot of love from developers. Hopefully FireScope can begin to push us towards having something similar for reference. We’ll see.
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