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.

Comments

Looks promising

[r_glen]

The fact that it's built from the Mozilla code base is encouraging...
Unfortunately (according to the FAQ), it won't be available until the first quarter of 2004

Exactly

[FrankoBoy]

WYSIWYG HTML editors are very useful to get most of your interface done FAST ; then, you can change some details with your favorite text editor.

Furthermore, writing accuented text in plain HTML is such a pain in the ass it's not even funny. You have to type stuff like "&eacute" instead of a sole key on a French keyboard ( I'm French-speaking ), and since most languages have non-standard - according to English, that is... - characters and that these are very common in text for some languages, I think such a feature is essential to a top notch international HTML editor.

I don't care much about vi and Emacs fanboys in here arguing how lame WYSIWYG editors are, the fact remains the same : these can do the bulk of some work fast, easily and effectively, and details can then be reworked in HTML mode as needed. Get the memo : knowing HTML doesn't make you 1337.

Waiting for the flames...

Re:People actually use those things?

[msuzio]

Actually, although Front Page sucks, DreamWeaver is a great tool. For setting up a fairly complex page, it helps to have a UI like this -- you can have the HTML view in one pane and the (approximate) browser view in another pane. DreamWeaver is very standards-compliant (in my experience, although I definately only use a small subset of the full features).

The biggest feature I use is the style-sheet support, actually. Helps to click through a few menus to build up the correct CSS for "white text in Arial 10 pt with 5 pixels padding left and 10 pixels padding top" -- I don't have to wrack my brain to recall the right syntax for something I don't have to use a lot. I'm reworking a pretty large site right now (166 JSP pages), and being able to use this is helping a lot in removing all the old tags and putting in nice stylesheet directives.

So yeah, this self-respecting geek uses it. One of the few Windows-based tools I really like. Mind you, the only other editor I use is vi (even on Windows), so it all balances out :-).

Looks iffy, actually (licensing)

[ciaran_o_riordan]

I smell a bad egg...
The FAQ says Nvu will be "covered under the MPL".

Mozilla is tri-licensed MPL/GPL/LGPL, so the user chooses which license they wish to use the software under.

Lindows.com can't alter the licensing situation of existing mozilla code, but if they only make their improvements available under the MPL - it will be Free Software, but the mozilla folks won't be able to merge improvements into the mozilla codebase.

So basically, Lindows.com are fulfilling the bare minimum legal requirement, and purposely blocking cooperation (so they can have the best version).

Either that or the FAQ is wrong, but Lindows.com have a shakey record in terms of community spirit.

Ciaran O'Riordan

Text vs. WYSIWYG

[efti]

I use Vim for just about anything involving editing text. I'm a web developer so I started off with Allaire Homesite, then moved to ColdFusion Studio, then Dreamweaver when CF Studio was discontinued. After about 3 months using Dreamweaver, I switched to a Windows build of gVim and I'm very happy with it.

But you have to admit that Vim is definitely not for everyone. You wouldn't give it to your average business user -- or even to a HTML newbie. It's not only the unusual keyboard shortcuts and the RegExp-driven text find / replace that make it totally unusable for a non-geek, but Vim is still a primarily text-based app that doesn't even offer code hinting.

These days, HTML is commonly used in a typical business. If Linux wants to make it to the business desktop, it is important to have a good quality WYSIWYG HTML editor to give to those who can barely use a word processor, and those who just want to make quick edits without having to learn HTML. Face it, not everyone wants to do that.

And for the people who do know HTML (like myself), their life would become much easier if the people who don't could give them a simple HTML page instead of a horrible MS Word doc that's impossible to automatically convert to anything resembling sane, semantically correct HTML.

No flame intended, just wanted to point out that this project is not such a bad idea after all.