Clever Polypane Debugging Features I’m Loving

I’m working on a refresh of my personal website, what I’m calling the HD remaster. Well, I wouldn’t call it a “full” redesign. I’m just cleaning things up, and Polypane is coming in clutch. I wrote about how much I enjoy developing with Polypane on my personal blog back in March 2023. In there, I say that I discover new things every time I open the browser up and I’m here to say that is still happening as of August 2024.

Polypane, in case you’re unfamiliar with it, is a web browser specifically created to help developers in all sorts of different ways. The most obvious feature is the multiple panes displaying your project in various viewport sizes:

Polypane browser displaying ryantrimble.com in three different viewport sizes simultaneously

I’m not about to try to list every feature available in Polypane; I’ll leave that to friend and creator, Kilian Valkhof. Instead, I want to talk about a neat feature that I discovered recently.

Outline tab

Inside Polypane’s sidebar, you will find various tabs that provide different bits of information about your site. For example, if you are wondering how your social media previews will look for your latest blog post, Polypane has you covered in the Meta tab.

Preview card displaying how open graph information will display on Mastodon.

The tab I want to focus on though, is the Outline tab. On the surface, it seems rather straightforward, Polypane scans the page and provides you outlines for headings, landmarks, links, images, focus order, and even the full page accessibility tree.

Polypane sidebar, outline tab, the view select options display the different views available: Headings, Landmarks, Links, Images, Focus order, and Accessibility Tree

Seeing your page this way helps you spot some pretty obvious mistakes, but Polypane doesn’t stop there. Checking the Show issues option will point out some of the not-so-obvious problems.

Polypane sidebar, outline tab, Landsmarks view, the "Show issues" option is enabled. In the outline, red text describes an error: Multiple banner elements at the same level found.

In the Landmarks view, there is an option to Show potentials as well, which displays elements that could potentially be page landmarks.

Polypane sidebar, Outline tab, Landmark view - the outline displays a red symbol indicating a potential landmark element

In these outline views, you also can show an overlay on the page and highlight where things are located.

Polypane laptop viewport view of ryantrimble.com, the landmark overlay feature is enabled, which outlines landmark elements in blue while also displaying their value

Now, the reason I even stumbled upon these features within the Outline tab is due to a bug I was tracking down, one specifically related to focus order. So, I swapped over to the “Focus order” outline to inspect things further.

Polypane sidebar, outline tab, Focus order view, displays an outline of the focusable elements on the page

That’s when I noticed the option to see an overlay for the focus order.

Polypane laptop view with focus order overlay enabled, displays guide lines marking the location of each focusable items

This provides a literal map of the focus order of your page. I found this to be incredibly useful while troubleshooting the bug, as well as a great way to visualize how someone might navigate your website using a keyboard.

These types of seemingly small, but useful features are abundant throughout Polypane.

Amazing tool

When I reached out to Kilian, mentioning my discovery, his response was “Everything’s there when you need it!”

I can vouch for that.

Clever Polypane Debugging Features I’m Loving originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

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