Slashdot Mirror
Lindows Announces Nvu - Frontpage For Linux?
CmdrStone writes "Michael Robertson, the Lindows founder, has announced in his 'Michael's Minute' newsletter that Lindows has started the creation of a Frontpage-type program for Linux, called Nvu." Nvu promises to be "...a complete Web Authoring System for Linux Desktop users to rival programs like FrontPage and Dreamweaver", is "100% open source", and will be free to download when it launches.
With web management. So, the editor may be Moz Composer, but some new stuff is on it.
For the uninformed, that is a fake (it has some xml copied from word).
Frontpage doesn't generate code that looks anything like that. Frontpage 2003 infact has a function to clean word generated html.
snot....
...
/snot....
SQL-Ledger is a double entry accounting system. Accounting data is stored in a SQL Server, for the display any text or GUI browser can be used. The entire system is linked through a chart of accounts. Each item in inventory is linked to revenue, expense, inventory and tax accounts. When you sell and purchase goods and services the accounts are automatically updated.
With the assembly feature you can build manufactured goods from parts, services and assemblies. When you sell assemblies all the accounts linked to the individual parts, services and assemblies are updated and stock levels adjusted accordingly. If any item belonging to an assembly is changed all assemblies are updated as well.
Invoices, Packing List, Income Statement, Balance Sheet, Sales and Purchase Order, Statements, Receipts and Checks are generated from templates and may be changed to suit your needs. Templates are provided in html and tex format. The tex templates are processed with latex to produce postscript and PDF documents and can be sent to a printer, displayed in a PDF viewer or sent out via email
SQL-Ledger can be used on any UNIX, Mac OS X and Windows computer. The application is written in Perl, developed on FreeBSD and Linux with Galeon, Konqueror, Netscape, Lynx, Links, W3M, Voyager, Explorer to render the display, Apache, thttpd, boa to communicate between the server and the browser, and PostgreSQL, Oracle, or DB2 to store accounting data.
I was just talking to my father about html editors. He is taking an HTML web clas in florida which is spending more time teaching him front page rather than teaching him HTML. I was explaining to him that Netscape/Mozilla's editor produce some of the best code, but was a pain to use whereas Frontpage, MS Office and Dreamweaver are absolute nightmares on the code (looks like ppl on crack and just learning how to code did it). What he wants is a nice simple easy to use editor for doing a web site, so thanx.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Indeed the "Publish Settings" dialog shown in this image sitemanager.jpg still has the Mozilla icon on it.
--Murray Barton
Bluefish
Screem
Quanta
The GPL does not require your software to be free to download. It just requires you to include the source code along with the compiled binaries if you do provide the software to someone for free or for money.
Of coruse, anyone who pays for it can subsequently give out the code for free, should they choose to do so.
BlueFish is a very nice free HTML editor, as is Quanta -- but neither has anything to do with what FrontPage or Dreamweaver does. What _does_ occupy that space (kind of) is Mozilla Composer, and this Nvu is going be Composer with a new name and some icons, it sounds like.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Also see MyBooks. It's intended as a Quickbooks replacement from small business on up to sub-ERP small and medium enterprise. It's written in Java so it runs even on FreeBSD and OS/2. Its backend is SQL. If you buy the high end package, you get the source code.
If you want some sort of preview release, try the Mozilla Standalone Composer. It's a couple weeks old, and released by the same person who's now head of the Nvu project.
You should take a closer look at the toolbar on screenshot available at http://nvu.com/screenshots.html
Daniel Glazman
It's open source. Even if it requires some component that isn't free in its original form (are there any non-free parts in Lindows?), somebody can hack it so that it doesn't and release it for free as well.
And this dialog has the Netscape logo.
Lindows will be releasing it under the Mozilla license. And, they've contracted a ex-Netscape employee (Daniel Glazman) to be the lead developer.
Read here for more and past information:
Lindows.com Announces Mozilla-Based Nvu...
Lindows.com Contracts Daniel Glazman to Develop...
Daniel Glazman Starting Company to Develop Composer
It's more likley its just a typo/"make it easier for the noob" comment. I know for a fact that patches will go to mozilla, because the guy that makes it has been the main person in composer development.
IntechHosting - Free domain, 2GB, PHP, £4.95/$8.95
"Syntax highlighting with support for ColdFusion, XML, PHP, SQL, Python, Perl, DTML - Zope, C++ and HTML, with more to come"
I can understand your frustration, but as a graphics guy and a web designer, I would like to defend the "text editor" approach. When I lay out a site, I do it in Photoshop with each element on a layer, then I export the layers as individual graphics. For more complex, chopped up graphics I use ImageReady. Once the graphics are done, however, it's hand coding all the way. Why? I have a few reasons.
1.) WYSIWYG editors do things without telling me what they are doing. This is both the WYSIWYG editor's greatest strength and weakness. If I build a page in Dreamweaver, I find that it's nearly impossible to edit the output by hand because I don't know how Dreamweaver chose to do what I told it to do. Did it align that image by making it float or by using absolute positioning? Is the text in a bold tag, a strong tag, or a span tag with a style on it? I can't find things in the document because I didn't put them there in the first place. This is problematic when I want to edit something quickly and can't figure out how the page is put together.
2.) Everyone has a text editor, and most people have ftp programs. If I'm on my boss's computer showing her a page I designed, she's likeley to say something like "can we move that image about 10 pixels to the left?" If I made the file by hand, it's a simple matter to ftp to the site, edit the file in a text editor, and save it. If it's a Dreamweaver file, I either have to go back to my computer and launch Dreamweaver or edit the file by hand, which is a PITA for the reasons described in reason #1.
3.) WYSIWYG editors give you a false sense of security. The document looks great inside Dreamweaver, so it must be fine, right? Wrong! Sometimes pages that look perfectly fine in your WYSIWYG editor will bomb on you when you display them in a browser. In order to get consistency across all browsers, an editor would have to design its pages to suit the lowest common denominator in browsers. Instead, they aim for the latest and greatest browsers because they can make prettier pages that way. By writing pages by hand, you get a feel for what works and what doesn't across various browsers. You get a "style" of building pages in which you gradually learn how to code for your intended audience's technology and still incorporate the types of design elements that you want.
4.) Filesize is not important in Quark, but it is in HTML. Your Photoshop, Quark, Word, GIMP, OpenOffice, and Kontour files don't need to have streamlined code. They can put whatever they want "behind the scenes" as long as it looks right in the end. With web files, they need to be as small as possible. There are still people using dial-up. No program has yet come up with a way to automatically generate perfectly streamlined HTML. It's possible they never will. If I have to clean the code that comes out of Dreamweaver, I'm not really saving that much time.
5.) WYSIWYG editors make people think that designing for the web is the same as designing for print. This is a big one, and it sounds like the parent poster has become frustrated (and for good reason) with the fact that the two design paradigms are not the same. "Things need to be perfectly aligned"? Tough. They may line up 90% of the time, but somebody is going to get a crappy version of your page unless you design for flexibility instead of perfection. People want to see your text at various sizes, they'll shrink their windows down or blow them up to enormous sizes, and just about anything they do that doesn't match your computer's settings when you designed it will make your page look dumb. Only Flash pages come close to perfectly scalable web pages, and Flash comes with it's own set of problems.
I don't have animosity toward WYSIWYG HTML editors, but I have yet to find one without the problems I named. The only animosity I have comes from frustration with people who have succumbed to reason number 5. Too many people don't understand that by using the "professional" web editor, they make their pages look more amateur unless they really know what they are doing.
I wish that my inferiority complex were as good as yours.
-RenderHead