JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA Blog

Recently we’ve added a new code highlighting feature that should make it easier to work with big and complex HTML files, with deep nested tags structure:

Please note that highlighting is only activated when there is more than one tag with the same name in the hierarchy.

By default, only 6 parent tags are highlighted with 6 different colors. You can change the depth to highlight or completely disable the feature in Settings | Editor | Appearance | Enable HTML tag tree highlighting.

Also you can tweak the colors in Settings | Colors & Fonts | HTML.

This feature is very new and we want your opinions. You are welcome to try it in the latest IntelliJ IDEA 10.5 EAP build and let us know what you think.

With IntelliJ IDEA 9.0.2 you can edit HTML and CSS code really fast using Zen Coding features. To use it, you have to install Zen Coding plugin for Web IDE/IntelliJ IDEA: go to Zen Coding Project Download Page, download an archive that contains a set of live templates, and extract it to “<Your Home Directory>\.IntelliJIdea90\config\templates” folder (”~/Library/Preferences/IntelliJIDEA90/templates” for Mac OS X).

• Zen Coding plugin involves more than 200 different HTML and CSS live templates. To see all of them, just open Settings (Ctrl+Alt+S), Live Templates, Zen Coding group.

• Native Zen Coding support allows you to generate HTML structures using complex templates. For example, try to type “form.form-comment#comment>fieldset” in an HTML file and then press TAB. In this case, “form” and “fieldset“ are live templates but you can use simple tag names instead.

• You can generate not only HTML but also XML structures. Basic features perfectly work for XML.

• “TAG.CLASS” and “TAG#ID” templates allow you to specify class and id of HTML elements, but you can specify a value of any XML/HTML attribute, i.e. you can write “person[name=Jack]“.

• You can use your own live templates as parts of complex templates. For example, suppose you have a template “entry” with the following template text: To generate a list of entries, you just need to type “entry-list>entry[number=$]*5″ and press TAB. By default, the “number” attribute will be generated before “type”. If you want to customize the position where it’s generated, add ATTRS variable to your template – for example: ATTRS variable must have empty string as a default value and should be skipped:

• Of course, you can disable Zen Coding support if you don’t need it (see Settings (Ctrl+Alt+S), XML Zen Coding).

To learn more about Zen Coding features, you can watch screencasts on Zen Coding project home page. Note that Zen Coding native support is a part of IDEA Community Edition, and its source code is freely available.

It often happens that we need to edit HTML code inside JavaScript literals. With Maia this is at last possible, and even with pleasure!

Completion, quick documentation, and navigation for HTML, CSS and even JavaScript inside JavaScript literals is at your service

If you ever coded a Web project, you know that all the errors in those HTML / JavaScript files are detected only during run time. Starting next build IntelliJ IDEA 9 (Maia) will help you to spot the problems much earlier. Just invoke Inspect code action from the Analyze menu on the necessary files.
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