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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.

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?

This, IMHO, is where the authors of HTML5 should focus their efforts. Create a Dreamweaver like (or perhaps a lighter product like coffee cup or Mozilla Composer) wysiwyg, HTML editor that produces correct, strict HTML 4.01 pages. If a new standard is to be created, it should be a minor release than could turned out in months, not years (HTML 4.1?).
Then, brand and market ("Is your browser 4.1 compliant? If not, download the new X browser!") the new standard with links to download one of several compliant browsers.

Problem solved.

By the way, what kind of code does Mozilla Composer or Nvu produce?

.

Nvu is a viable Dreamweaver alternative.

http://www.nvu.com/index.php

No doubt that I would agree with the parent 100%. GIMP may be acceptable for casual doodler or cropping photos, but it ultimately a complete waste of time for any professional accustomed to a plethora of serious tools and a myriad of features used daily to make a living. We don't even have to discuss its' intolerable user interface because GIMP's graphic capabilities are not even in the same ballpark as Photoshop.

However, one may be able replace some of the other software depending on how you used it. The original poster framed the scenario as tools for the marketing department to use, which clearly lowers the bar in terms of expectations as to what level of competency will be applied. Marketers are not designers, so it would appear as though if Software X does a reasonable job approximating most tasks of Adobe Y, then one can adopt it.

Photoshop - You're unlikely to replace that one. Although, someone else mentioned Pixel which could possibly cut the mustard depending on your needs. Otherwise, there really is nothing to compare to Photoshop.

Illustrator - Definitely have a strong look at Inkscape. I've toyed with it for 2 or 3 years to keep tabs on its' development, after being fairly impressed during my first run through. These days it has continued to advance and I'd suggest it's ready for the professional world. You can create substantially complex pieces with Inkscape which will probably far out-pace the ability of your Marketing department to bother learning in the first place. While it might be missing a pet feature or two, the bottomline is that Inkscape is ready to be taken seriously as a replacement for Illustrator (and, previously, FreeHand).

InDesign - Professionals already use Scribus to handle multipage full color layouts sent directly to commercial print houses, so it's gotta be worth your time to look at. CMYK separation, PDF generation,and much of the toolsets you'd expect to see in Quark or InDesign; certainly more than enough power for your Marketing department.

Acrobat Pro - If you're heavily using features like annotation, collaboration, form creation, et cetera, then you probably won't be replacing Acrobat Professional. Nothing can touch it. However, if all you need is to be able to allow your Marketing droids to generate PDFs from documents they create in other software, then you can slap PDFCreator on their little Windows boxen. Remember that OpenOffice already has the ability to turn any of their normal documents and spreadsheets into a PDF at a click of a button. Surely, you've dumped MS Office by now.

Dreamweaver - This is a tough one because you should probably rethink your environment to realize you most likely don't really want Dreamweaver to be used. Unless you're just using Slashdot to conveniently survey the geek mindshare, the odds are that WYSIWYG is an old paradigm no longer needed by most scenarios. What you probably want is some kind of content management engine which your key tech person(s) can administer such that your Marketing department can monkey with the website(s). One engine could be adapted to various websites, if you proposed such a need. If I were to suppose someone was trolling Slashdot, then I would mention Quanta Plus before realizing Marketing droids would be helplessly confined to Windows and thus I'd point to Nvu as your capable hero.

But, really, if an evaluation of your technical needs leads you back to WYSIWYG, then you've made a logical error somewhere. The days for that hobbled solution are definitely over.

There you have it! Free and open source software is up to the challenge is most regards. Where there are shortcomings, there are adept proprietary solutions for far, far less than the onerous cost of Adobe

NVU is worth a look. It's what Netscape Composer "became" in the way Navigator "became" Firefox.

Best web design advice ever: Start > Settings > Control Panel > Add/Remove Programs > Microsoft FrontPage > Remove > Yes

Don't know what happened there. let's try it again http://www.nvu.com/index.php

It's not dreamweaver, but it's pretty functional. http://www.nvu.com/index.php/

Photoshop --> GIMP http://gimp.org/
Illustrator --> Inkscape http://inkscape.org/
InDesign --> Scribus http://www.scribus.net/
GoLive --> Nvu http://www.nvu.com/

I'll let the others here argue/bash/whine/praise each app.

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.

I have not actually seen what is on their CD, but there are some examples of free programs, most of which, have already been mentioned, that are available for both Windows and Linux.

• Firefox Web browser
• Thunderbird full-featured email program
• GIMP Image Manipulation Program
• ImageMagick software suite for creating, editing, and composing bitmap images
• Inkscape is an Open Source vector graphics editor
• ClamWin free antivirus scanner for Windows
• 7-Zip file archiver
• Celestia space simulater that lets you explore our universe in three dimensions
• OpenOffice office suite
• Scribus professional page layout program
• AbiWord word processing program
• Gnumeric spreadsheet
• LyX Document Processor
• Gaim multi-protocol instant messaging (IM) client
• Audacity Sound Editor
• Blender the advanced 3D modeling program capable of producing high quality animations
• VLC - the cross-platform media player and streaming server
• Nvu complete Web Authoring System

Who the f*** decided that sentences on the Internet shall no longer be formatted with two spaces after a period?!

I'm so glad I'm not the only one irked by this. There's no way for me to undo years of habit and start typing a single space. If modern browsers want to close up the space, fine... but I'm going to keep typing two spaces.

What's frustrating is when automatic HTML formatting tools like Nvu automatically turn the second space into a non-breaking space (nbsp). Half my sentences end at the end of a line and have a CRLF after them, which is treated like a normal space... and the result is that some sentences are separated by single spaces, and others are separated by two spaces. Worse, though: if a sentence is at the start of a line, but has nbsp at the start, my left margin is shot. D'oh!

Wow. Thanks for giving me an excuse to get *that* off my chest.

try nvue

It's now NVu:
http://nvu.com/

Added to that is the relative lack of quality freeware and open source apps and utilities (compared to Windows or Linux platforms).

Seriously? What open source app or utility doesn't run on OS X?

He said freeware and open source, but off the top of my head (including freeware):

Foobar2000
Exact Audio Copy
VirtualDub
DVDShrink
Quicktime Alternative
Media Player Classic
7-zip
Quickpar
Nvu
Irfanview
Picasa 2
Paint.net
FileZilla

I run both Linux and OS X (I have also run Windows quite a bit), and I do a reasonable amount of web design. I'll add some thoughts here that may be helpful to you if you're considering switching.

OS X:
  * Slickest interface, most friendly "automatic" daily experience, but nowhere near as configurable
  * Photoshop, Microsoft Office and Macromedia Studio available (BUT not in native Intel mode, unfortunately, so there will be a performance penalty)
  * Full set of UNIX tools and a shell to get things done that way if you're a UNIX user
  * Lots of open source utilities from the Linux world also available here

Linux:
  * Decent interface, can also be very slick (I'm a KDE user, so I'm referring to that specifically) - and you can customize to your hearts' content, unlike with OS X
  * If you're willing to pony up about 40 dollars for Crossover Office, you can run Dreamweaver Studio MX, Photoshop 7, and Office 2003 quite well under Linux. I've tested them all and had very minor problems, if any. The Photoshop performance actually tested out at pretty near native speeds except for very complex rendering tasks, from what I remember of the original case studies.
  * Open source tools like GIMP, several high quality text editors (try "Kate" under KDE, for instance), and so on
  * For web design, also check out Quanta, Bluefish, and nvu. I've used all three, Quanta probably the most. I always ended up giving up on any sort of WYSIWYG tool because I'm insanely particular about the XHTML output of my sites, but all three seem reasonably solid tools, and NVU is cross platform as a bonus.

There are other benefits to each platform, but from a web development and designing point of view, these were a few I could think of offhand. Hope that helps.

-Jay

Have a look at Nvu.

While it might perhaps be best to withhold judgement until vista actually ships, I would tend to agree with your sentiments. I assume many others will too. For the future: Macs are the longtime favorites of publishers, artists, etc. If you are comfortable with apple and their offerings, give it a shot -- many of the tools with which you're already familiar run well in OSX. Otherwise, you might be quite honestly surprised by modern offerings in the linux software universe. If you'd rather avoid gimp, vim, and other popular OSS tools, you still have a variety of options. For graphics, you might instead try inkscape and/or run photoshop in wine (it is quite useable, stable, and more importantly: stable). For development and editing: http://www.nvu.com/index.php or again go the wine route with dreamweaver and flash. By all means do what works for you.

Try Nvu, it's good enough.

I teach computers at an international school in Tokyo Japan. My students vary in age from grade 6 to grade 9. As you can imagine, they also vary in English language ability. Here is my curriculum:

Grade 6: Drape - A drag and drop programming language (No longer free but you can downloa it from my homepage).

Grade 7: Game Maker - A more complex drag and drop programming language created by the same person who created Drape.

Grade 8: Kids Programming Language - A BASIC-like programming language with easy to use graphics (sprite) capabilities and built in functions such as collision detection. Note that an updated version with 3D graphics capablities will soon be released (around Sept. 2006).

Grade 9: JavaScript - I use a program called Max's HTML Beauty++ for editing JavaScript and NVU for web design.

I have also used Small Basic and my own JavaScript Interactive Fiction engine.

You can find downloads of most of these programs and some lesson plans at my homepage.

Feel free to contact me if you have any further questions.

When I was first appointed as a faculty member around 1996 I immediately started using web pages with my classes. Many of my pages had alot of the features that Blackboard now claim to have a patent upon (discussion forums, etc.). I have even published an academic paper on this stuff, as I was an 'early adopter'.

Eventually, my school bought into the Blackboard thing. I refused to join in, because my web pages provided all the functionality I needed, without needing the huge computational overhead and without the security concerns. The necessity of JavaScript is a particular concern. Then Blackboard made a big marketing move: we had to sign up for an expensive new version. As a State school, we could not afford it, so we had to quit Blackboard. We moved to Moodle.

The move to Moodle produced a whole new pile of problems. It seemed that some faculty, having learned how to do things with Blackboard, appeared incapable of learning Moodle! They bitched and complained. One idiot from the English dept. even suggested in our Faculty Senate that we should try and develop a Moodle interface that emulated Blackboard! Fortunately, common sense prevailed and this was not approved.

However, here is the problem: techno-phobic faculty members are now hooked on Blackboard. In our case, they are being forced to wean themselves to Moodle. All this being said, much or most of the functionality available with these systems can be provided in plain HTML, with a few tricks, to enable passwords and the like. With good modern HTML Editors (like Nvu), once these are set up correctly, plain web pages can be created without the user realising that they are doing anything too much different from writing an MS-Turd document. However, it seems impossible for me to convince other faculty to do this. We all have PhDs, so at least some of us should be smart. After all, my 11 year old daughter can make web pages! Yet, the luddites still abound. These are the people Blackboard are relying upon to make them their millions. I think that it is just sad.

You want NVu http://www.nvu.com/. It's WYSIWYG CSS editor taught me everything I know about CSS.

Squiggly line not included.
And while I've not used it Nvu looks interesting.
Of course, real mean use emacs^Wed.

P.S. Captcha sucks fat donkey balls, and ain't exactly standards compliant...

• Photoshop: The GIMP - how many times does this need to be said, the interface is slightly different but the gimp has most of the features of photoshop plus a few of its own.
  Why don't I do the rest of the main Adobe stuff while I'm at it:
  
  • Pagemaker: Scribus
  • Illustrator: Inkscape
  
  
• Games: Cedega - but maybe you'd be better off using a console (not as in bash you blockhead) as they're cheap and while piracy for them is a bit harder its doable if you're commited.
• Autocad: a quick search reveals two commercial solutions LinuxCAD and VariCAD and a guide to getting AutoDesk's Autocad running under wine
• Dreamweaver: NVU, Amaya, hell even fckEditor or, if you're hardcore then vi(e)macs.

Apple doesn't seem to care about the server market

Apple has discontinued newer versions of WebObjects deployment tools for platforms other than OS X Server. And yet, they have started shipping WebObjects development tools for free with their computers and OS. This seems like a strategy to encourage people who buy Macs to get into designing sites using WebObjects, while locking them into publishing those sites on computers running OS X Server. It seems like a move to promote their servers.

Since WebObjects development is free, I'd like to be able to explore its use as a WYSIWYG website editor as well as it's other capabilities, but sadly I can't just publish onto a Linux web server. I downloaded NVU since it's a free WYSIWYG editor, but I don't really have any options for casually getting into the capabilities of WebObjects for running websites.

The user shouldn't have to look at HTML source much, if at all.

Actually, it's surprising that the open source community hasn't developed a really good web design tool.

So how does the Sea Monkey web editor compare to Nvu? If it's better, that'll really suck having to download a whole suite just for that one component. Why Mozilla Corp/Foundation hasn't released it's own editor still is beyond me...

Personally, I prefer my HTML autogenerated/manually created, but I had a play and it seemed OK.

A true (X)HTML freak will probably use a sophisticated text editor (like EditPad for Windows, nedit, bluefish or even emacs for Linux...), but for beginners a tools like Dreamweaver or Mozilla Composer or its next version nvu might be a good place to start. With NVU / Mozilla Composer, if you need something special in your source, you can switch to source-edit-mode and change or insert it.

A big disadvantage of many hight-level tools is their inability to cope with PHP. (By the way, the parent is right to say that PHP is a much better beginner's choice, since it is not as cryptic in syntax.)

On the client's side, you might find javascript useful. With a HTML layout tool, PHP and javascript, you can probably do most pages.

He's doing it himself. He did mention his use of Amaya and Nvu.

CSS, once I learned it (getting the excellent http://www.nvu.com/nvu helped), struck me as the way the web should have been designed to start with. At least all the style twiddling is done in one place. At least I use just *one* command to do one thing. Never mind "50 creative ways to do it."; just give me ONE way: the RIGHT way!

As for TFA, I love canvas and can't wait to start working with it. It looks like the kind of thing javascript was meant to do 20 years ago when everybody started trying to gangbang it. But javascript itself...I would still like to see java and css integrate themselves closer. In fact (as I've said before in these very hallowed halls) I wish for ONE language that does EVERYTHING with one unified syntax - not using this fourth of a language to write this module, and this tenth of a language to write that section. How about making a *whole* web language that can stand on it's own for a change? Since when is trying to knit five baby languages together to make one little page a good idea, when I only needed one language to write the whole operating system and the web browser on?

Last but not least, forget the backward compatibility. These days, my philosophy is: "Use the brightest and best technology that pleases me at the time, and if it's not compatible, tell 'em to get a REAL browser." I'm sick and tired of trying to build a page that will accomodate *any* Rube Goldberg contraption that *any* moron whacks together and calls a web browser. Do we make our freeways to accomodate ruk-tuks, Big Wheel tricycles, and pack elephants? Come to that, are the roads in a Tibetan temple designed to accomodate Mac trucks and American Monster SUVs? The time has come to say: "If you insist on traveling the world using only a Conestoga, there are certain places you just won't be able to go. We can't pave the ocean just for you."

Forgot the link to the article...have included all relevants links in this one.

Linux.com ran a story about web development tools.They approach it as "web development tools for Linux," but most are available for win32 and OS X. I have almost no experience with commercial web development tools (except when trying to tidy up their ugly code). I use content management systems/wikis/etc. where possible (so others can add content & no one need worry about the code or an editor) & a text editor () when not. That being said, Bluefish, Quanta, and Nvu are all nice. All of these options are discussed in the article, as is Screem, which I haven't seen first-hand.

nvu.com

Nvu (note spelling) is indeed a great program. It's an open source project that supports Linux, Win32 and Mac OS X. You can use it in a WYSIWYG mode or you can edit the source of the page directly. Besides being free, it also includes support for editing CSS styles (including external style sheets), a must for building sites today. Plus you can get extensions that add neat new features. Definitely worth a look.

Eric
Invisible Fence Guide (CSS to make it fancy is still coming...)

Nvu (note spelling) is indeed a great program. It's an open source project that supports Linux, Win32 and Mac OS X. You can use it in a WYSIWYG mode or you can edit the source of the page directly. Besides being free, it also includes support for editing CSS styles (including external style sheets), a must for building sites today. Plus you can get extensions that add neat new features. Definitely worth a look.

Eric
Invisible Fence Guide (CSS to make it fancy is still coming...)

bluefish which is available for MacOSX
and nvu which is also available for MacOSX.

Obviously, the suite would not be complete without NVU, or some sort of Composer. I wonder why no one thought about it before. How could we name it? Let me think ... Mozilla Firefox ... Mozilla Thunderbird ... Mozilla Sunbird ... a unique app ... for mail ... internet ... uhm ... full integration ... i got it! Let's call it Windows !

GIMP, Inkscape, Nvu. Fine, these products are nowhere near as good as anything Adobe/Macromedia offer, but if they stagnate the competition will eventually come from Free software like this. I doubt they'll stagnate though.

Productivity:

Graphics:

Media:

Internet:

Survival Kit:

Development:

The company I work for always provides me with Non-OSS supplies like Fireworks, Dreamweaver, Frontpage, MS Office, and Windows XP. But my work at home involves various types of media projects including audio, video, and web. Right now I use Nvu for development, Audacity for my audio editing, and I'm trying out Jahshaka for video editing. And of course Open Office for everything else.

Leo is an "outliner" for programmers but it doesn't have to be used like that. On your screen it just looks like a Windows or Mac folder browser, only they're not called folders but outlines or nodes. Every outline has text inside of it, or you can "hang" other outlines under it for more organization.

The reason I use it instead of folders to organize my notes is that I can "clone" a node (CTRL-`). This will duplicate a node and you can drag it into another part of your Leo document. The reason cloning is better than making a copy is because Leo will automatically keep cloned notes identical.

If you made a note about something and it's also helpful to have this information filed at another part of your notes collection, close to another subject, you make a clone. If you'd made a copy and you updated 1 copy, the other copies would be out of date. With clones, you don't have to worry about that.

As an example, I have a node with
"All my hardware"
and I also have a node called
"My FreeBSD server documentation"
One of my boxes is part of both categories of information. It's a cloned node ofcourse.
Now, everytime I change something on my server's hardware, I only have to update 1 of the cloned nodes and the other will automatically have the same update.

That's one of the good features about Leo. Unfortunately, nodes contain only text, not formatted text or images. However, because it's open source you could add that yourself when you can program in Python. Python is also the reason it's cross-platform.

I use it for both my to-do/task document and my general notes (as 2 seperate files).

However, with .html files you could ofcourse keep notes identical by only organizing links as you would organise Leo nodes, every document you'd edit, even if that document would show it's link in multiple categories, would be editing the original document. So that way wouldn't introduce synchronisation difficulties either. It might be a little more cumbersome in exchange for gaining images and text with typefaces.

It's just a suggestion, give it a try. Just put the word "@nocolor" in the root node and hang all the other nodes under that to supress Leo's programming syntax coloring.

For easy HTML editing I'd use Dreamweaver or the open-source clone Nvu, it's about to go version 1.0

As for templates, I see the word in one of the menus, but in 10 seconds I couldn't get it to do what you're talking about. Maybe it does, or you can simply create your own blank log file which you then open and save for your various needs.

HTH

I'm currently using Nvu and HTML Tidy to build my sites.

I'm tired of using non-standard tags and I'm also tired of making webpages with VI so I've started using Nvu. It's a true WYSIWYG editor but since it's not production-grade yet I run the pages through HTML Tidy to clean up the excessive tags and markups that might get left behind in Nvu.

It has a few nice tools and since it's Gecko-based it renders in Firefox exactly like it does in the editor.

For my javascript and php work I try really hard to use KWrite, it looks just like Notepad++ and is pretty neat, and vi ('cause I'm an CLI old-fart).

http://www.vim.org/
http://bluefish.openoffice.nl/
http://www.nvu.com/
http://www.eclipse.org/
http://quanta.kdewebdev.org/

Gee.. I wonder why you posted that as an AC

Using linux does not have to mean typing in scripts at a bash shell.
Linux can be made to look and act just as point-and-clicky as windows.

Using K12LTSP enables you to quickly set up a large school network where students have access to office applications, web browsing, photo editing, desktop publishing, web publishing,programming languages , etc.
It also centralizes network administration, allows for recycling hardware, and saves a ton of money on software licensing.
It is important to teach computer concepts, not just the nuances of the latest proprietary office suite.

Just remember, It should never under any circumstances be the responsibility of educators to teach brand loyalty.

Comments can cross multiple lines. A comment continues until the end marker is encountered. Once a comment has begun, the only thing an HTML or XHTML parser recognizes as a command is the end of comment tag, which is a double dash (--) not immediately preceeded by an exclamation point. ( xhtml comments)

I just tried the pasting "if[IE]" comment into NVU, and while it did collapse the whole thing down to one line (see below), it worked as expected in both firefox and IE 6.(Firefox displayed nothing, IE displayed a block element) The only pitfall I found is when pasting the <!-- part. If you put that in the comment text box, the generated comment is <!--<!-- with a matching set of closing tags, the second of which is (correctly) ignored. I've never had this problem since I do this sort of thing in note pad once I got a page looking the way I want it. What's more, both types (block and inline) of comment validate.

<style type="text/css">p.showIE{display:none;}</style>

<!--[if IE]><style type="text/css" />p.showIE {display:block;}</style><![endif]-->

It's nowhere near as powerful (yet), but try out Nvu. It's meant to be a Dreamweaver clone, and it's pretty decent.

Do you have a text/html editor?
Some people do.

Up until recently, it was almost impossible to get this little program called Nvu on Gentoo (using standard portage tree, not overlays). They finally updated it to the new version 0.9 recently, but they just had version 0.6 (huge difference) for quite a while there... This is why I hate relying on my distro for all my software I want to run on their OS.

XAML is to XUL what J++ (or c#) is to Java: Microsoft "innovation". They see a promising technology, reimplement (badly, if not ass-backwards) it to suit their purposes, call it new, and the PHB's are none the wiser.

Since it's against MS's interests to be cross platform, and XAML/Avalon is Longhorn/XP+SP3 (IE7) only, users/corporations have no choice but to choose the original technology, or pay for another ride on the upgrade-go-round.

Applications are already being built in XUL, go check out MozDev, or ActiveState's Komodo, or Nvu. At least one web-based application plans to have an available XUL interface (see my sig).