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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

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