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I have created some fairly elaborate DOM elements with an :after pseudo-element, and I'd like to be able to inspect and tweak them in either Chrome Inspector or Firebug or equivalent.
Despite this feature being mentioned in this WebKit/Safari blog post (dated 2010), I can't find this feature at all in either Chrome or Safari. Chrome does at least have checkboxes to inspect :hover, :visited and :active states, but :before and :after are nowhere to be seen.
Additionally, this blog post (dated 2009!) mentions this capability exists in the IE dev tools, but I'm currently using Mac OS, so this is no help to me. Additionally, IE is not a browser I'm primarily targeting.
Is there any way of inspecting these pseudo-elements?
EDIT: In addition to being wrong about Firebug being unable to inspect these elements, I've found Opera to be pretty good at Inspecting :before and :after elements out of the box.
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In Chrome's Dev tools, the styles of a pseudo-element are visible in the panel: Otherwise, you can also input the following line in the JavaScript console, and inspect the returned CSSStyleDeclaration object: getComputedStyle(document. querySelector('html > body'), ':before');
All you have to do is right-click on the part of the page you want to change, then click the Inspect or Inspect Element link that appears on the bottom of the right-click menu. When your Developer Tools pane opens, it should automatically highlight that sentence. Pretty neat, huh? It's the little things that count.
One of the easiest ways to inspect a specific web element in Chrome is to simply right-click on that particular element and select the Inspect option. Clicking on the Inspect option from the right-click menu will directly open the Developer tools including the editor, Console, Sources, and other tools.
::before is a generated content element that represents a styleable abstract first child of the respective element. The content inserted using ::before is inserted before other content inside the element and is displayed inline by default. The value of the content is specified using the content property.
In Chrome's Dev tools, the styles of a pseudo-element are visible in the panel:
Otherwise, you can also input the following line in the JavaScript console, and inspect the returned CSSStyleDeclaration object:
getComputedStyle(document.querySelector('html > body'), ':before'); window.getComputedStyledocument.querySelector
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As of Chrome 31 pseudo elements show in the elements panel as child elements of their parent as shown in the following image:
You can select them as you would a normal element but if you remove the content style then the pseudo element will also be removed and the devtools focus will change to it's parent.
It appears that inherited CSS styles are not viewable and you can't edit CSS content from the elements panel.
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