I recently started using the Aardvark extension for Mozilla Firefox – this is a useful little tool which, when switched on, shows you the HTML element you’re currently hovered over and any class or id applied to it. This is handy to see how pages are put together or to find out which element you should be styling in your own pages.
I was reading the article “Fixed or fluid width? Elastic!” over at Roger Johansson’s 456 Berea St this evening. I decided to switch on Aardvark to check out how the principles were being applied on his site. Curiously, it didn’t work for this website! I checked a few other blogs that I read regularly (those in my Blogroll list) and discovered that while it worked for most, it also failed to work on The Autistic Cuckoo and SideSh0w.com. Why this should be remains a mystery – does anyone have any ideas?
I’ll try and investigate further when I have time but would interested to hear thoughts or opinions about what’s going on.
Update: I figured out that, of course, Aardvark doesn’t work if the site is XHTML served correctly as “application/xhtml+xml”. I haven’t looked under hood of it yet but I suspect it relies on the JavaScript command “document.write” which doesn’t work in XHTML.