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LWATCDR inquired:

Okay how about Kompozer and Bluefish http://bluefish.openoffice.nl/index.html and http://kompozer.net/

Bluefish is just a text editor. It's a powerful, capable, lightweight text editor that can handle a huge number of open files simultaneously - but it's just a text editor. Handy for coders, but the OP asked for WYSIWYG editors, not text editors. (Personally, I still use good, ol'd PFE 32 1.01.000.)

Kompozer does a pretty good job of cut-and-paste for tables, and I like the integrated FTP client and the ability to call W3C's HTML validator service from within the app. That said, it's still a beta application, and there hasn't been any development on it since 2009 (which means, among other things, that it's still broken on Linux). On the good foot, it's OS, so anyone with coding skills is free to fix any bugs or add any features they like.

NVU has been replaced by Kompozer http://kompozer.net/ It isn't perfect but it is what I use right now.

Okay how about Kompozer and Bluefish
http://bluefish.openoffice.nl/index.html
and http://kompozer.net/

I agree with but since no one seemed to have any answers for this person... I have not used these but they seem to be options a Dreamweaver replacement. NVU http://net2.com/nvu/ Quanta Plus http://freecode.com/projects/quantaplus Amaya http://www.w3.org/Amaya/ Blue Griffon http://bluegriffon.org/ Hope this helps the original poster. Oh and if you just want free as in beer. http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/products/2010-editions/express I have used any of them but out of this is you will probably find something that will fill the bill.

I hadn't heard of Blue Griffon, so I looked it up and found that it is made by the same guy who made Nvu all those years ago. Nvu hasn't been updated for over 6 years, so as a result the community forked it and it became KompoZer. Now, though, KompoZer hasn't been updated in almost 2 years. The other options don't appear to be faring much better on the release front. It looks like Blue Griffon might be the way to go at the moment.

Yes. http://www.kompozer.net/donate

I know you jest, but seriously, Emacs has a *wonderful* editing tool for webpages called nxhtml. Why is it wonderful? Because it has a sane way of handling inline JS-, PHP and CSS code. This feature alone blows all other editors out of the water.

If you want a WYSIWYG, though, I'd have to reccommend KompoZer.

Seriously, isn't there anything (cheap/free) out there that will just let somebody edit a web site in WYSIWYG mode?

Nvu (which is based on Netscape Composer, but hasn't been updated for years), KompoZer (which is based on Nvu, but hasn't been updated in over a year) and BlueGriffon (where do they get these names) which seems to be under active development.

The last time I used KompoZer it worked, but crashed every once in a while and wasn't HTML 4 compliant. Maybe BlueGriffon is better.

SeaMonkey Composer is the best way to make WYSIWYG, What You See Is What You Get, HTML files.

From what I read, no one even merged the Nvu code improvements back into the Composer source tree, much less the improvements to Nvu that now form KompoZer. Besides, there are other up-to-date and free WYSIWYG editors for HTML. Do SeaMonkey Composer for example even support modern HTML standards and cross-browser validation?

Here. SeaMonkey's Composer as a stand-alone program.

You're welcome.

Nvu is old and unsupported.

Which is why he should use its fork, Kompozer.

Hi,
Firstly if you're looking for opensource app replacements you can always try www.osalt.com.

Personally I'd try:
Photoshop: GIMP or GIMPShop or Krita
Illustrator: Inkscape or XaraXtreme
InDesign: scribus
Dreamweaver: KompoZer or Aptana or seamonkey or Amaya or href="http://net2.com/nvu/">NVU

I also found this website which might help: www.thefreesuite.com

Here are the relevant OSalt links:
photoshop
illustrator
indesign
dreamweaver

Could you write an editor in it?

You joke, but...

As a reminder, Composer was a part of the Netscape/Mozilla suite since nearly the beginning.

Thanks for recommending Paint.NET. Just tried out out, and it seems a lot easier for Photoshop users to switch to than the GIMP (even GIMPshop). Coupled with Inkscape and Kompozer, I now have a reasonable combination of apps to replace Adobe's Creative Suite (except for Flash).

The Linux/open source community gave up on web design tools. There used to be Netscape Composer and Nvu, but they're dead.

http://www.kompozer.net/

Adobe has real problems, then. Here's the bio of their CEO, Bruce Chizen. Mattel Electronics merchandising. Microsoft eastern region sales manager. VP sales of Claris (remember Claris?). Zero background in any industry that uses Adobe graphics products.

He's identified the marketing problem: "These products are designed to appeal to a younger generation of Internet users for whom paying $400 for a packaged software product is a thing of the past." That's reasonable enough. The going rate for a photo editing program is somewhere below $99. Adobe Photoshop Elements is at $99, it does most of what most people want to do, and people buy it at retail. Adobe's problem there was that they thought they could raise the price of Photoshop from year to year, and that didn't work. The price trend for software is down, not up.

Since they acquired Macromedia, the Macromedia products have gone downhill. Dreamweaver 8 and later are horrid; Adobe can't get FTP to work reliably, create HTML that will pass validation, or make the view in Dreamweaver match the view in the browser. The newer versions are notably worse than the old ones. I just hope they don't break the Flash player engine, which is an elegant and delicate little piece of software. That thing does more in 2MB of code than most programs today do in 200MB.

On the video side, Adobe's problem is that the low end has been taken over by tools that come free with Macs and cameras, while the high end has been taken over by tools from high-end players like Avid. Premiere was once considered a high-end tool; now it's a low end tool with a high end price. Not good.

Open source isn't helping that much here. There's still no good open source replacement for Dreamweaver. Nvu, which had real promise, was abandoned by Linspire back in 2005. There's a fork, called Kompozer, but even its authors just call it "Nvu's unofficial bug-fix release". The Gimp has its enthusiasts, but it's not really targeted at graphic artists. Look at its web site. Would you get a graphics tool from those people?

There's a better fork of Nvu called Kompozer. It's essentially a bug-fix release while the original author of Nvu recodes Nvu in XUL or something.

For vector graphics, check out Adobe Illustrator's nearest competitor, CorelDraw. For bitmap image editing, check Corel PhotoPaint (part of the CorelDraw suite) or Corel's PaintShop Pro software. For desktop publishing, consider QuarkXpress or the open source app, Scribus. For making PDF files, look into Foxit PDF Creator or PDF Creator. I don't believe there are many low priced or open-source alternatives that are comparable to Front Page or DreamWeaver. However, take a look at Kompozer (an improved version of the open-source NVU). For what it's worth, that's my advice for low cost alternatives to the Adobe Creative Suite.

As a complete amateur I have enjoyed Nvu for its interface.

other alternatives may be
http://www.aptana.com/download_all.php
http://www.inkscape.org/ (quite good, but haven't used it for web applications)
http://kompozer.net/

ZDNet has an article on that very subject.

Free Alternatives:

Photoshop -> Gimp
Illustrator -> Inkscape
InDesign -> Scribus
Web Design -> Kompozer, which is a bugfix release of Nvu (there's actually a lot of these, I've also heard Microsoft Visual Web Dev Express, which has a lot of praise from various people)

Not sure of a good PDF editor, but it looks like this claims to do the trick (though i'm sure is nowhere near the level of Acrobat Pro): PDFEdit. Be warned it looks like it's a cygwin port to windows...

I can't guarantee that those will all live up to your expectations, but I am fairly familiar with most of that software, and it certainly gets the job done.

Actually the bugfix version of nvu - http://kompozer.net/ is pretty decent.