Finally you can kill off dull threads... literally

[NickFitz]

Brill. I didn't know you could put jscript in the address bar. All sorts of possibilities there.

It's a really handy way to debug stuff, if you have the page's structure in your head. For example:

javascript:alert(document.getElementById("post_message_1213143").innerHTML);

will show the textual serialisation of the internal DOM structure of this post. (If the resultant dialog flows off the bottom of your screen, Just Press Return to get rid of it.) That's pretty trivial (except when it lets you determine that different browsers are interpreting markup differently), but if you know your way around the DOM you can use the same approach to find out computed styles and all kinds of other useful info.

Of course we now have much better tools like Firebug for Firefox*, Web Inspector in Safari and Chrome, Dragonfly in Opera, and Microsoft® Web Developer Tools for Internet Explorer™ in IE8™ and IE9 Beta™ that render much of this redundant; but I still use such techniques regularly when debugging stuff on...

• Nick to come and explain it, probably with some reference to IE6

...IE6™ on a machine where I can't install either the Microsoft® Web Developer Toolbar™ or Microsoft® Visual Studio Web Developer 2008 Express Edition™, both of which can be extremely useful once you suss out the remarkably recondite manners of their workings. (I mean, really, I have to create an empty ASP.NET™ project, launch it, and then send the new browser instance created thereby to the site I actually want to debug? Pur-lease.)

* That reminds me: at ClientOrg last year I was able to find a bug in Firebug by using the javascript: URL technique to determine that it was reporting incorrect values. This was on pre-beta versions of both FF 3.wotever and FB x.wotever-was-intended-to-work-on-3.wotever, but that bug report helped the Firebug folk to get it fixed by the time 3.wotever was released

[shaunbhoy]

I now have a reason to visit Monday Links.

Why would you want one?