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is being used – useful when you see a color somewhere that you think would<br />
work great on your website.<br />
My personal favorite color program is Color Schemer, available at<br />
www.colorschemer.com – it has all the features you could really want in an<br />
HTML color picker. If you're after something free, though, you might like to<br />
try the more compact Pixie, from http://www.nattyware.com/pixie.html,<br />
which sits in the corner of your screen and tells you the color code of any<br />
color you hover over.<br />
HTML Checkers.<br />
There's not much competition when it comes to HTML checking: what you<br />
really need is the W3C's HTML Tidy, or one of the many programs based on it<br />
(see http://tidy.sourceforge.net/). Tidy can clean up truly disastrous HTML,<br />
including the kind of thing produced by many of the more popular editor<br />
programs like Dreamweaver, and applications like Microsoft Word. Even if<br />
you think your code is great, the chances are that Tidy will be able to make it<br />
smaller and better.<br />
Mozilla Firefox Extensions.<br />
When you use Firefox as your web browser, you gain access to lots of<br />
extensions that you can install quickly and easily. Since so many people<br />
using the browser are web designers, there are more extensions available<br />
for web development tasks than there are for anything else. This makes<br />
Firefox an ideal browser to use when you're writing a website.<br />
Which extensions are most useful? Here's a quick list:<br />
Web Developer's Toolbar<br />
(http://chrispederick.com/work/firefox/webdeveloper/). This is the most<br />
useful Firefox extension out there for web designers. Its best feature is that<br />
it lets you experiment with CSS styles 'live', so the style of your page changes<br />
as you do it – a great way to write CSS.<br />
LinkChecker (http://www.kevinfreitas.net/extensions/linkchecker/). You<br />
absolutely must check your website for broken links, but it's usually quite a<br />
chore. Because LinkChecker integrates with the browser, it can check your<br />
The Web Design Guide for Newbies |86