Firebug - HTML/CSS Editing - Saving?

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jaryth000

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Mar 23, 2008, 4:22:54 AM3/23/08
to Firebug
Iv been using Firebug for a pretty long time now, mostly for trouble
shooting and watching network activity. I always knew you could edit
HTML/CSS, but until recently I had no idea to what extent, and I must
say that its amazing.

So, the question I have is, when viewing and editing Local Files, is
there any way to actually... Save the changes? I mean, looking at
files, editing the HTML and CSS, and having it update in real time on
the page, AutoComplete, and all the many other functions that allow
you to find bugs and issues in pages... and yet it has (as far as I
can tell) no way of saving the pages (that Iv found), and that Kinda
surprised me.

Granted, you could edit, then just copy and past into notepad or
something... but being able to do it in Firebug would turn it into an
all around awesome editor. Add FTP capability to that (so you can test
it wile you view it, then save it to your website when your done)
would be spectacular.

Also... I realized by default that Firebug was disabled for Local
Files... why is that?

What are other peoples thoughts? Am I just missing something? Do you
agree/disagree? Is there any chance of these capabilities being added
in the future?

-Jaryth

John J Barton

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Mar 23, 2008, 2:44:05 PM3/23/08
to Firebug
A most requested feature but one that is widely misunderstood. In
Firebug you are editing the end result of the server and browser
processing. Saving this result will not necessarily help the site
developer. It's like using scissors and glue on a newspaper: yes you
can create amazing new layouts quickly, but the publisher of the paper
may not be able to implement these changes by putting your cut and
paste result into the press. I think there is scope for work in this
area, but I don't know of anyone working on it.

Bob Hassinger

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Mar 23, 2008, 3:54:03 PM3/23/08
to fir...@googlegroups.com
At 02:44 PM 3/23/2008, you wrote:

>A most requested feature but one that is widely misunderstood. In
>Firebug you are editing the end result of the server and browser
>processing. Saving this result will not necessarily help the site
>developer. It's like using scissors and glue on a newspaper: yes you
>can create amazing new layouts quickly, but the publisher of the paper
>may not be able to implement these changes by putting your cut and
>paste result into the press. I think there is scope for work in this
>area, but I don't know of anyone working on it.

Perhaps we can already do this and I am forgetting:

The modified styling is difficult or impossible to "save" so it can
be used directly as you point out. However, is there a way to
capture the effective styling as a record you can go back to your
code with? We have displays of the effective styling cascade for a
given element. Can we capture it? Is there any way to capture the
total cascade for all the elements? Is that logically
possible? Logistically feasible (e.g. how big does it get)?

By "capture" I am thinking of getting the information into a file, or
if that is too hard due to representing formatting in a file in a
simple way for example, then at least as a printout of the sort of
thing we see on the screen.

That would let me get the look I want and then document what the
effective cascade looked like to get it. I could go back to whatever
I have for code and change it to get the cascade effective cascade I need.

jaryth000

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Mar 24, 2008, 8:57:09 AM3/24/08
to Firebug
But the thing is, one of my main points was editing of Local files. I
understand what your saying, but I, as the developer (of a website)
like having the ability to change a value and see it automatically
update. I can use this to get perfect positions, colors, fonts, and
have anything look right. True, you can do the same with any plain old
WYSIWYG editor, but Firebug is different as it lets you seamlessly
edit all the aspects of the code. I mean, if I see something is off, I
can use Firebug to see what is off, what is causing it to be off, and
how ti fix it. But then I simply take the corrections I made in
Firebug, and bring them to my text editor (PSPad in this case) and
paste them.... being able to have Firebug save these things on its own
would be quite useful, and save a lot of time.

I understand what your saying, as many things these days in Web 2.0,
are dynamically edited, and Firebug only sees the end result of that
(and only from Firefox's perspective). However, I still feel it would
be a very useful addition, being able to at least save local files.

I would also like to note... that just after posting this, I did a
quick search (which, yes I know I Really should have done BEFORE
posting, Im sorry) and realized there where already many topics on
this subject. I was going to remove/post an apology sooner..... but
this topic took forever to actually show up.

On Mar 23, 12:44 pm, John J Barton <johnjbar...@johnjbarton.com>
wrote:

david.karr

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Mar 24, 2008, 1:31:00 PM3/24/08
to Firebug
I went into this group just now to ask a very similar question, so
it's apropos that you're asking about it now.

I don't have the need to "save" the file to the web application, but I
do have a need to locally test the change to some degree. For
instance, I'm debugging a problem with a load balancer configuration
through SSL. When I do a view source, I see that the "base href" url
could be a problem. I'd really like the ability to change it
dynamically and see if the page works properly after that change. That
would confirm to me what changes I need to ask for. Is there any way
to do something like this?

NBhack

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Mar 27, 2008, 1:04:57 AM3/27/08
to Firebug
I agree. This would, indeed, make an already powerful program the
Grand PooBah of site development tools. This is precisely the thread I
was looking for this evening, and now, having discovered others who
would like to see the same functionality built into FireBug, I can say
I'm feeling quite validated at this point. Imagine the ease of hacking
your code in real time through Firebug. It would be a dream come true.
Wish I had something substantive to add to the conversation in the way
of a solution. Instead, I'll just add my voice to all those on this
thread who are salivating at the thought of being able to save their
changes through F.B. on the fly. Well...I can dream can't I.

Soap

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Mar 29, 2008, 6:08:06 AM3/29/08
to Firebug
Just wanted to chime in here and say that a save feature for local
work is an absolute must-have feature.

I've been using the Web Developer plugin for Firefox for about two
years, and I just installed Firebug tonight and it completely blew me
away in terms of functionality. The one thing missing is a save
feature, which I found incredibly disheartening considering how badly
I want to use this as my one and only tool for web development.

Until it's implemented, I guess it's back to the old Notepad++ for
editing. There are obvious advantages to editing your code and seeing
it in effect in real-time, but the consequences and hassle of
transferring my changes back into my editor slightly outweighs them.

Implement a save feature. Without it, this is a waste of an otherwise
amazing plugin.

Asrail

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Mar 29, 2008, 2:07:31 PM3/29/08
to fir...@googlegroups.com
Soap, 29-03-2008 07:08:

> Until it's implemented, I guess it's back to the old Notepad++ for
> editing. There are obvious advantages to editing your code and seeing
> it in effect in real-time, but the consequences and hassle of
> transferring my changes back into my editor slightly outweighs them.

https://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/webdevel.html#edit_styles

It's easy to make a plugin that work for Firebug as long as you only
edit the CSS itself, and don't edit the computed property.


Reuben Avery

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May 16, 2008, 7:29:56 PM5/16/08
to Firebug
If I had the ability to modify my CSS stylesheets within Firebug and
then save back to a local file with a click, that would save me SOOOOO
much time it is crazy. The amount of time wasted for me in reloads is
substantial and a huge pain.

I try to modify my work habits to minimize the amount of reloading i
have to do, but still i find myself doing it wayy too often. I work
on big sites with tons of very specific layout and art direction. It
would be a MAJOR win for Firebug to get this into the next version!

I know there are circumstances (url rewrites, dynamically generated
css) where this would be implausible, but for most of my work, a
simple mapping of "the http root of this site = this local path" would
be just fine.

Pretty please????

leandro

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May 18, 2008, 1:59:26 AM5/18/08
to Firebug
would be awesome if this could be implemented! as a skinner of ipb
foruns, this feature will help a lot to change the css today and
continue it tomorrow...
john, is it too hard to do it? i'm not developer so i don't know...

Steve

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May 23, 2008, 6:20:16 AM5/23/08
to Firebug
You can get quite close by copying the value of
document.documentElement.innerHTML, and pasting it in a text file
between <html> and </html>. This makes Firebug into a great editor for
HTML files!

New classes added to the CSS in the HTML file are included, but
changes to existing classes in the HTML file seem not to be. Edits to
CSS or scripts in other files obviously aren't saved.

dan gaz

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Aug 15, 2011, 5:13:47 PM8/15/11
to fir...@googlegroups.com

Look at this Easy Tip for Everybody :)
http://install-climber.blogspot.com/2011/08/how-to-save-html-changes-in-firebug.html
Firebug+WebDeveloper

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Ricky Loureiro

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Jul 18, 2013, 1:09:51 PM7/18/13
to fir...@googlegroups.com, ly...@gmx.com
Hi Jaryth,

your link does not work, please help me.

I just need to know the files to edit on html

Regards
Rick

Sebastian Zartner

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Jul 18, 2013, 6:10:59 PM7/18/13
to fir...@googlegroups.com, ly...@gmx.com
Hi Rick,

that link was posted by "dan gaz", not Jaryth, and it links to:

http://tutorialforlinux.com/2011/08/how-to-save-html-changes-in-firebug/

Anyway, saving HTML changes back to the server is not possible at the moment. It would just be possible for static HTML pages, anyway. Though normally the HTML output is generated by some server-side script. For CSS the situation looks different.

See our FAQ entries related to saving HTML changes and CSS changes back to the server for more info.

Sebastian

PS: Please open a new thread next time if the thread you want to post to is already older than a few months.
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