Tilt Firefox Extension: DOM Inspection in 3-D

How much time do you spend traversing the DOM in Firebug, exploring the relationships between nodes, analyzing the structure of code and trying to manipulate it with nasty (or not so nasty) JavaScript? Well, perhaps you’d like to try a different approach to DOM inspection for a change. Mozilla’s new tool, Tilt Firefox Extension lets you visualize the DOM tree of any Web page in 3-D. Because the DOM is essentially a tree-like representation of a document, the developers of the tool have decided to layer nodes based on the nesting in a tree, creating stacks of elements, each with a corresponding depth, and textured according to the Web page being rendered.

Unlike other DOM inspectors, Tilt allows for instant visual analysis of the relationship between various parts of the Web page, but it also makes it easy to see obscured and off-page elements. On request, developers can pull in further information on each node’s type, ID, class or attribute, providing a way to inspect (and edit) the inner HTML and other properties. The driving force behind the visualization is WebGL. The latest build of the extension is available for downloading and should work in the latest version of Firefox. Who knows? Perhaps playing with the DOM can be fun after all.