TechgnosisWeb Prime

Hey all. Well, UT2004 continues to rock, Crystal Chronicles just keeps getting better and better, and I just installed the beta for NVU, a fork/recode of Mozilla’s Composer component. As some of you may know, the Mozilla project has been pushing for separating each of the applications that make up its core app suite. Firebird.. excuse me, Firefox.. is set to replace the main browser (formerly Navigator), Thunderbird is replacing the mail component… but I hadn’t seen much effort to replace the other components, namely the web page editor, or the IRC client (understandably, perhaps, since they’re the ones least often used). I don’t think anyone is working on the IRC client (which is fine, since the IRC client area is quite well covered allready under both Linux and Windows (and Mozilla’s offering in this area was sub-par IMHO), but it turns out that the Lindows folks took it under their wing, and are re-releasing it as NVU, a fully WYSISWIG HTML editor, in the vein of FrontPage and Dreamweaver on the Windows side. They’re releasing it for free under the GPL and plan to contrinute all their code changes back to the Mozilla project when it’s ready, so that’s good. Recently, they released the first beta binaries of it on their website, and I decided to download it and give it a try, mostly for Natalie’s sake so she can do minor web editing on HotNakedElfChicks.com and VoodooBunny.com without having to take a crash course in HTML, but also for myself, since sometimes it’s just handy to have a quick tool for dealing with tables and forms and the like.

Although it’s definetly unfinished, as a couple of raw edges shine through here and there and some of the featuje sets aren’t complete, it’s allready quite a bit of an improvement over the web editor it was originally based off of. The interface is clean and professional, with all the major buttons and areas you’re likely to have to deal with easily accesible. Thanks to its Gecko engine base, the HTML rendering in WYSISWIG form is excellent, and things like ‘Tag View’ make identifying different areas of the page quite easy. I do wish it had code highlighting for when I have to deal with the raw HTML, but then again, maybe it does and I just haven’t found the option to turn it on yet.

The feature set is nice, though not complete. Think FrontPage, pre-2000, rather than Dreamweaver. It’s definetly a tool for the lone web designer or HTML newbie, rather than for a team of web pros, at least so far, but as the feature sets get fleshed out in line for a full release, this program could definetly be a contender on Linux, giving some competition to other Linux HTML editors such as Quanta and Bluefish. Keep an eye on this one.