Fiddler

This week’s tech tool, Fiddler, is an extremely useful tool to have around when reaching the final stages of creating  a website.

Fiddler is a HTTP Debugging Proxy which logs all HTTP traffic between your computer and the Internet. Fiddler allows you to inspect all HTTP Traffic, set breakpoints, and “fiddle” with incoming or outgoing data. Fiddler includes a powerful event-based scripting subsystem, and can be extended using any .NET language.

I myself have used it many times for looking at cookie data, finding out if a particular CSS file is loading, or seeing if any of my file paths are returning 404 errors.

Fiddler’s definitely worth a look, and at the price of free - how can you go wrong?! Check it out!

You may remember back in January we wrote about Internet Explorer 8 featuring version targetting, and how we would need to use a meta tag to identify content built for Internet Explorer 8.

Today, after much feedback from the community on the matter, Microsoft have gone back on that decision and are instead opting for a more standards focussed solution.

Microsoft recently published a set of Interoperability Principles. Thinking about IE8’s behavior with these principles in mind, interpreting web content in the most standards compliant way possible is a better thing to do.

We think that acting in accordance with principles is important, and IE8’s default is a demonstration of the interoperability principles in action. While we do not believe any current legal requirements would dictate which rendering mode a browser must use, this step clearly removes this question as a potential legal and regulatory issue. As stated above, we think it’s the better choice.

You can read more about this reversal of decision on the Internet Explorer blog.