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Mozilla The Internet

Nvu 1.0 Released 41

An anonymous reader writes "Version 1.0 of Nvu has been released. Nvu is a standalone WYSIWYG HTML editor and a continuation of Mozilla Composer. As one would expect for a Mozilla-based product, it is fully Web standards-compliant and all the code will soon be available at mozilla.org. Nvu 1.0 can be downloaded for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. Further details are available at MozillaZine. Slashdot reported on the first beta of Nvu way back in February 2003."
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Nvu 1.0 Released

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  • Messy WYSIWYG (Score:4, Interesting)

    by niskel ( 805204 ) on Wednesday June 29, 2005 @02:38PM (#12943318)
    Personally, I have always found WYSIWYG editors to produce very messy code. It's refreshing to hear that Nvu actually supports standards, but like most other WYSIWYG editors, it's produced code looks a bit messy. I think I may just be a stickler for good looking code but maybe because it's hard to add PHP and other such code when it's hard to navigate the initial generated code. Vim is still my editor of choice :)
    • I agree about WYSIWYG making messy code, that's why I finish off my pages with a pass through TidyHTML [slashdot.org].

      It's a little more work but the results are very readable, not-messy HTML.
      • Re:Messy WYSIWYG (Score:5, Informative)

        by Universal Nerd ( 579391 ) on Wednesday June 29, 2005 @02:55PM (#12943534)
        Sorry 'bout that... the correct link is:
        http://tidy.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]

        Let me just add that TidyHTML reformats the code, strips out excessive tags, changes a few tags into CSS equivalents (if you allow it to do so), points out open tags and, what I like the most about it, it reindents the HTML to increase readibility.
        • Re:Messy WYSIWYG (Score:3, Interesting)

          If both NVu and tidyHTML are open source, then can't they be integrated? e.g. automatically tidy the page before saving. The tidy project page even says "a library form of Tidy has been created to make it easier to incorporate Tidy into other software."
    • Yeah, I usually use NVU to build a base page, but then I used jed to fix up the code so it works and looks perfectly.
    • Agreed, WYSIWYG is the crutch that most so-called designers rely on, and Dreamweaver is the worst offender. Even with complex tools like this, you still have to know what you're doing to use it effectively: the vast majority of people I've met who don't code by hand barely know any HTML, and understand little more than basic CSS. WYSIWYG is a tool, not a slave.

      NVU has a history of (re)formatting source in crazy ways, maybe this will be fixed soon. This is the only reason why I don't use it, but I prefer

    • I think Nvu is perfect for non-techies who are looking for a free tool to help them build Web pages. The non-techies aren't going to be looking at the generated HTML much initially, so what does it matter if it's not perfect? Most HTML isn't perfect, anyhow, and there is an option in Nvu to turn off the auto-formatting.

      What I really like about Nvu is the built-in CSS integration, so that you can put most of the presentation details in the style sheet and stick to mostly structure in the HTML. I wrote a bl

  • about the only thing I find myself wanting in an html editor is source code highlighting. everything else is just fluff.
  • I'm sitting here staring at the text on the download page, and I'd swear I'm seeing something not unlike JPEG artifacts around the bold text, except that I'm sure it's not a graphic. Eventually I realized there's a faint vertical band image behind some of the text, and that my vision wasn't going all screwy. If making users question their eyesight is one of the great new features they offer, then, uhh, yeah. That's not cool.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 29, 2005 @03:19PM (#12943775)

    The design of a web page changes depending on all sorts of different circumstances.

    • The size of the monitor
    • The resolution of the display
    • The font size of the user
    • The size of the window
    • Whether or not the user has a sidebar open
    • What toolbars the user has installed
    • Various other browser settings
    • Platform/browser-specific issues (e.g. form control appearance)

    The term "WYSIWYG" simply doesn't apply to the web. The web is a fluid medium and web pages change in appearance under varying circumstances without any change to the code. The term "WYSIWYG" applies to paper. The web is not paper.

    • Yeah, but there's an ActiveX control that can account for these things and once you do that, everything should look exactly like the mockup I did in Photoshop.
      • This is a troll or a joke, right?

        I mean, I know that some sites/products (notably Plone [plone.org] use some JavaScript to implement missing CSS properties in various browsers, but an ActiveX super-fixer-upper?

        I've seen ActiveX do a lot of things (many that it shouldn't), but never fix IE rendering to the point it's pixel perfect with Photoshop. Not to mention that the biggest problem on the web is still fonts (although this may be due to legal, not technical, concerns).

        Not to mention that ActiveX controls only eve
        • This is a troll or a joke, right?

          The intention was a joke, but if someone called it a troll, I guess I couldn't really prove otherwise.

          I'm a standards freak who codes all HTML and CSS by hand (although I do let BBEdit do all the tedious monkey work of updating relative URLs, image sizes, etc.). I did briefly flirt, many years ago, with Javascript browser sniffing to send NS or IE versions of a page, and more recently I have used sniffing to feed different style sheets to work around some MSIE bugs. But
          • Personally, I prefer using ifIE tags to sniffing.

            It works on everything post-IE4, and if you're talking about browsers that old, you don't even have the assurance of Javascript being turned on at the client end.

            Plus, you only end up with one version of the page.

    • WYSIWYG in this context means not looking at raw html. Even though "the web is a fluid medium and web pages change in appearance...", I still think seeing how a page renders on this machine, with this rendering engine, etc., and being able to directly edit the same view, is useful. "The web is not paper", yes, but in all cases the WYSIWYG view in Nvu is a lot closer to the way the page will actually appear than opening the html file in vi.
    • The term "WYSIWYG" simply doesn't apply to the web.

      Actually, N|VU is WYSIWYG. You are literally editing HTML with a hot rodded browser.
    • And this is why you test your developed sites in various settings and browsers.

      It doesn't really matter how you *made* the page, it always need to be tested properly, that's what matters, not the choice of editor.
  • Correct me if I'm wrong, but it doesn't look like there's WebDAV support in Nvu. Still, this is just what I've been looking for for my daughter, the aspiring artist. With WebDAV support it could become a lightweight alternative to Dreamweaver at work, especially if it can play nice with Zope templates!
  • Useless... (Score:3, Funny)

    by GypC ( 7592 ) on Wednesday June 29, 2005 @03:43PM (#12944119) Homepage Journal
    ... to me without vi keybindings.
  • PHP (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Beuno ( 740018 ) <argentinaNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Wednesday June 29, 2005 @04:15PM (#12944546) Homepage
    Now, if only Glazman would give up fighting against PHP and make is useable enough for us web developers. (You can't open PHP files in Linux unless you do it VIA FTP or you stand on your left foot while holding your nose)
    Although for those who still only develope plain HTML it's a great app.
    • Re:PHP (Score:3, Insightful)

      by JamesTRexx ( 675890 )
      And that's the people they're aiming for right now (despite the claim to rival Dreamweaver). I use it because I only need simple pages without any scripting behind it. I believe as soon as they've got the whole "plain" html and css done they'll extend nvu with support for scripting languages. After all, you don't want to start by trying to do everything at once.
      • Yes, he has been claiming this, altough the main page does kinda say:

        "Finally! A complete Web Authoring System for Linux Desktop users as well as Microsoft Windows and Macintosh users to rival programs like FrontPage and Dreamweaver"

        Still, just to be able to OPEN a PHP file in linux would be a very big step forward.
        • by Rysc ( 136391 ) *
          Still, just to be able to OPEN a PHP file in linux would be a very big step forward.

          $ nano index.php

          There, that was easy. Why are you having such trouble?
  • I tried 1.0PR (20050427) on Debian/Linux the other day. Sorry, but God, what a piece of crap. I used to be ashamed for using MS Frontpage, but after seeing this, I'm glad I do. Nvu is sloooow, buggy, basic things like selection, copy-paste, and typing Enter doesn't work very properly.

    I'd rather put hope on Quanta, but its VPL (WYSIWYG) editor is still largely unfinished.

  • by Gopal.V ( 532678 ) on Thursday June 30, 2005 @02:22AM (#12948336) Homepage Journal
    What you see is what you get ...

    But that does not apply to someone else with a different browser, different resolution and color depth.
  • I downloaded NVU a couple of days ago and tried it a bit (the Windows version). The test project was a basic photo album site. I gave the thing a couple of hours, but gave up in disgust after it lost a file I had painfully edited (so please don't consider what follows as anything but a rant. I didn't get to the advanced features at all. The thing may be a diamond in the rough for all I know)

    The software is buggy and doesn't respect the platform's conventions (extremely annoying: why for example doesn't C
  • I use Dreamweaver at work and love it. But it's a bit too expensive for my personal use. I never touch the WYSIWYG view or any of the fancy "features." What I want in an editor is code highlighting, auto-indenting, auto-complete tags, tabbed file editing, and the lovely tree menu and ease of uploading that Dreamweaver has. If someone can point me to something along those lines I would appreciate it. I have done a bit of searching but didn't seem to find anything.
  • I'm impressed that Nvu has good support for CSS & XHTML, but I hope that the developers will be able to integrate better
    creation in the WYSIWYG editor (like using div's instead of tables or creating div's on the fly from the toolbar).

One man's constant is another man's variable. -- A.J. Perlis

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