Comments on: View-Source IS Good. Full-stop.

By: ~robcee/ – Inspector Impetus

~robcee/ – Inspector Impetus — Fri, 21 May 2010 14:52:02 +0000

[...] we include View Source in Firefox 3.6. I’ve blogged about how important view source is and how awesome it is that we have it, but inspection is a [...]

By: Lukas

Lukas — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 18:58:12 +0000

Excellent points. I wouldn’t be here today, or even be that interested in the web if it wasn’t for stuff like view source that helps you learn how to customize the web. From early attempts to learn html, to my current side project of wordpress theming – it’s all much better when you can see the code behind the pretty pictures laid out on the page.

By: Alex

Alex — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 19:35:17 +0000

Firefox’ “View Source” functionality has always been quite useless for me until I found this plugin: http://users.skynet.be/mgueury/mozilla/

That’s probably the most comfortable way to validate you markup in Firefox (not more than one click) and view the pages source at the same time.

By: robcee

robcee — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 19:14:14 +0000

@atul I like the idea of prepending some kind of link to a non-minified version of the file. It doesn’t add a lot of weight to the file and provides an easy way to see what you’re really looking at. I’d certainly use that feature if it were available and I bet others would too.

By: Atul

Atul — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 18:50:45 +0000

Is there any kind of ad-hoc standard we could create that might allow a minified file to be able to “point” to its full-source representation? e.g. a comment at the beginning of the minified source of the form “//@non-minified: http://foo.com/blah.js“? I suspect if some standard were set up, a lot of library and “minifier” tool creators, as well as web devs, would be happy to put metadata in to make it easier for folks to understand their code. I could be wrong, though.

Another thing I frequently try is that, if a file is called foo.min.js, I try just removing the “min” and seeing if that works. Often it does, so perhaps the view-source tool could just do that automatically. Ideally we should be able to access the JS parse tree of the code and make sure the un-minified source matches the minified source.

By: robcee

robcee — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 22:57:10 +0000

@ozten: that’s a good point and one of the big problems with JS debugging in Firebug too. It’s hard to come up with a decent all-around solution. JSBeautifiers only give you a reformatted view of a minified source file, but the variables and function names are still cryptic. Maybe some cleverness would work: Detection of a popular JS library would offer a link to the non-minified source for browser? I dunno, but good food for thought!

By: Ozten

Ozten — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 21:48:52 +0000

I think the current challenge to view source is performance. Getting better yslow scores means concatenating separate scripts, minifying, etc or with “Closure” recompiling easy to read JavaScript into high performance JavaScript.

I think View Source should trump performance concerns, but for high volume websites it’s a hard sell. The more the platform makes these optimizations unnecessary, the better for View Source.

By: Aaron

Aaron — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 19:09:18 +0000

More the reason to improve Firefox’s View Source, i.e., See my blog post

http://aaronmt.com/?p=601

By: Sumana Harihareswara

Sumana Harihareswara — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 17:07:49 +0000

I nearly can’t believe people ask Firebug to block some inspection! Wow.

By: Arguments for “view source” » Dissociated Press

Arguments for “view source” » Dissociated Press — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 16:06:44 +0000

[...] Russell poses the question that few probably ever think to ask: Is View Source good? Rob Campbell replies "of [...]