inessential by Brent Simmons

12/21/00

Little bits of software

Here are a couple small things I like point to every now and again, in hope they'll be useful to somebody besides me. I myself use these pretty much every day.

Web File Types Contextual Menu Plugin
For Mac users, a utility that makes it easy to set the type and creator codes for downloaded Frontier files. You know the drill -- you download a guest database and need to deal with the type and creator codes before opening it. With this utility it's a click away.

Validate HTML and Validate CSS Bookmarklets
For any browser that understands JavaScript bookmarklets. You can validate the HTML and CSS of the frontmost page displayed in your browser with a single click. This is useful not only for standards compliance but for fixing bugs -- the validator will tell you about unclosed tags, for instance. (Note: scroll down on the page linked to above to find the bookmarklets.)