TypeGauge

I’m very excited to finally blog about this publicly, as my good friend and co-laborer at the nytimes.com— Pau Santesmasses has released his firefox extension “TypeGauge“.

What is it?

Many of you fellow web developers may be using the completely-must-have extension Firebug already. Well, sometimes you may want to know some details about html elements and those are the only things you need. In the case of TypeGauge, these details are the particular html tag, font-size and line-height.

Why is this important? If you care about your typography and are striving for consistency across browsers then this information is critical. A good example of where this comes into play is when sizing fonts for Safari, if you have somehow ended up with a decimal value instead of a whole number (maybe your font-size percentage on the body element does not give you a whole number, like another site I deal with everyday), Safari will round up the value and this will cause your font to be larger in Safari than say Firefox.

Enter TypeGauge

Once you’ve installed and activated TypeGauge (by clicking its icon in the status bar) you can freely hover over elements on your page in the same way that Firebug works. TypeGauge gives you tag, font-size and line-height results for every item on the page. The font-size and line-height results are the browser computed values so you can depend on the accuracy.

I’ve been using this extension for a few months now and can bear witness to its value in my day to day web development. It’s indispensable.

Big Up to Pau for building a clean, simple, yet powerful extension that is an essential tool in any web designers box.

So go get it and admire the proper web design where the extension lives too—Looks great Pau.

Yeah bu…

Have you ever had a conversation with someone (or tried) but you couldnt get much in because they liked the sound of their own voice so much? I know I have, and generally after a few tries, I just give up or in. All of the things we learned (or didn’t learn) when we were young about listening and paying attention, not interrupting and waiting for another person to finish before our turn comes— were right.

Sometimes, as designers we can fall into the same trap. We get so wrapped up in what we want to say that there isn’t much room left for dialogue.

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Just a quick heads up on those of you (like me) who hadn’t checked out flock the new opensource browser. It’s still in developer mode, but you can download it and take it for a test drive.

And for you extension hungry Firefox user types, you have nothing to fear as they have already implemented that into flock and have chose some of the arguably best extensions available to start with. All you web developer toolbar die hards and adblockers take a sigh of relief.

Thumbs up for first impressions, it has an gui that mac users will undoubtedly gravitate to which is one of the main gripes from many mac die hards about Firefox (although I like its minimalistic approach). It fits into Tiger quite nicely. And its ALWAYS nice to have another standards aware browser around for both pc and mac to heat up the fire on MS IE.