Greasemonkey

Hacks 40–46: Introduction This chapter is devoted to tools for web developers. More than anyone else, developers of web sites and web applications know the limitations of the medium. Browsers are optimized for viewing and interacting, not authoring...

Firefox has options to ignore fonts and colors defined on web pages, buried behind the Colors button in the Preferences window. These are global settings, and they affect every site you visit until you go back to the preferences dialog and change the...

Although it's not generally considered "friendly" behavior, there are several reasons why you might want to have some pages refresh themselves automatically. One is simply to keep an eye on the latest news. Another is to keep your login sessions aliv...

Have you ever seen a standards-based site that used CSS in an innovative way, and you asked yourself, "How did they do that?" Then you had to view source, scan through all those angle brackets, find the link to the stylesheet, and load it manually in...

Here's a feature I've always wanted and never found in a browser: the ability to generate a report that shows all possible information about all the images on a page. It would be extremely helpful in debugging my own complex web pages, and it's just ...

One thing has always bugged me about the MSDN reference pages. Viewing them locally within Visual Studio allows you to hide the code snippets for languages you're not interested in, but viewing them online always displays code examples in every langu...

Web forms have two modes: GET and POST. Search engines are examples of forms that use the GET method; once you submit the form, you can see all the form values in the URL of the next page. POST forms, on the other hand, are opaque. You can tell you s...

XMLHttpRequest is a JavaScript technique that enables a page to interact with the server without having to reload the entire page. This nonstandard API was first developed by Microsoft for Internet Explorer, but it was later picked up and implemented...