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There are several panels in the DevTools, but the Elements panel is one of the most useful for front-end developers. It provides a conduit to directly interact with the DOM and styling. This makes it easy to test out and debug structural and aesthetic issues in HTML and CSS.
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The panel that we're looking at here is
the Elements panel.
0:00
You'll notice that says elements right
here.
0:04
There's a lot of other panels and we're
gonna look at each one.
0:07
There's Resources, Network, Sources,
Timeline, Profiles, Audits, and Console.
0:10
In the Elements panel, on the left side
here, we have the dom tree, or document
0:19
object model tree, which is basically a
fancy way of saying our HTML code.
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So we can go ahead and twirl out all of
our different
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HTML elements here, and we can see what
our document looks like.
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Over on the right side here, we have our
CSS.
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So when we click on any of our elements in
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our dom we can see what the CSS looks
like.
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Now, when I pull up the Dev tools, if I
haven't right clicked and hit
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inspect element, and I've just brought
them up using the Hot key or the Menu.
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I can go ahead and still select elements
using this little magnifying
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glass tool down here at the bottom.
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So if I click on the magnifying glass,
you'll
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see that I can hover over anything on my
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web page, and it will give me a little
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bit of information about it in this little
tool-tip here.
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So you can see how much space the element
is actually taking up.
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And you can also see what kind of margin
and padding that element has.
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And that's the orange area.
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And then, in the tool tip, we can also see
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the total amount of space that the element
is taking up.
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So, this element is 745 pixels by 111
pixels.
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And we can also see what type of element
it is, so this is an H1.
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Down here, we have an A element, with the
class.btn on it.
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And over here we have an image.
Now,
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I'm just hovering right now, with my
magnifying glass selected.
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If I actually click on something, you'll
see down
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here that it will highlight the tool in
the DOM.
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So it's highlighted that H1.
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And we can go ahead and open that up, and
see the contents of it inside.
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Now when we select an element like this.
Like I said before it
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will also show the CSS for that element
over on the right.
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So, we can go ahead and do a couple of
different things here.
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We can uncheck CSS properties.
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And that does exactly what you would
expect.
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It enables and disables various pieces of
CSS.
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We can also actually edit the CSS.
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So I can go ahead and click, and let's say
we wanted this to be a smaller font size.
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I can go ahead and do something like that,
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or I could increase the font size, just
like that.
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And when I click away,
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that will be maintained.
We can also go ahead and edit the HTML.
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So
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I can click here and I'll right click.
I'll say edit text.
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And I'm just gonna change this to say,
this is my cupcake website.
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And then when I click away, you can see
that
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it changes it in real time in the browsing
window.
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Now one thing to keep in mind here is
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that this doesn't actually save to any
kind of file.
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This is just going to edit it in your
browser.
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So nobody else will be able to see this
and if I refresh the page, it will
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go exactly back to how it was previously.
So all of our edits will be removed.
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So if you're actually editing something,
you'll
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want to do that in your Text editor.
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You don't want to do that in
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the Chrome Dev-tools.
However, the Chrome Dev-tools are great if
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you just want to quickly experiment and
try a couple things out or, trace bugs.
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There's a couple more things to go over in
the Elements panel.
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Now you saw that we can edit text, but we
can also actually edit attributes.
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And we can add attributes as well.
So, for example, if I were to right-click
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on this div here, I could edit the HTML.
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Or, I could edit an attribute, or I could
add an attribute.
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And let's say I wanted to add an ID of my
div, and
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that's not going to do anything because
there's no styles associated with it.
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But you get the idea.
You can go ahead and add attributes there.
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We can also rearrange elements.
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So if I were to grab one of these and then
click
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and drag, you can see that it rearranges
it in the DOM
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and it's also rearranging it on my webpage
here.
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So you can see that we've rearranged the
page just by clicking and dragging here.
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And again, if I go ahead and just refresh
the page,
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it's back to normal.
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Now, the Elements panel is real useful for
debugging, as I mentioned earlier.
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If you're trying to figure out where
certain CSS is being applied.
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Or how something is being done, you can go
ahead and inspect an element.
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So for example, you'll notice on this
button we have some rounded corners here.
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And you might wanna know, if that's being
done with an image, or if
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it's being done with the border radius,
CSS property.
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We can do that by clicking on the button.
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We look at the button class, and we find
that in our CSS over here.
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And we say okay.
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It looks like border radius is being
applied here, and if we were to uncheck
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that, we could say yes, indeed, there is
not an image there that's styling that.
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It's actually being styled with border
radius.
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Which, by the way, is probably the way
that you wanna do that.
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That about wraps things up for the
Elements panel, next
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up we're gonna take a look at the
Resources panel.
6:27
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