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

Re:Looks promising

[nsingapu]

From the FAQ: How is Nvu different from other HTML editors available for Linux?
There are five main differences: ... 3) Integrated web file management....
I have to say in this respect I've found quanta already far exceeds the windows offerings, as support for the fish protocol (transfers files over secure shell) means one can avoid ftp like the security scorge it is. With dreamweaver even SFTP dosn't come out of the box.
Me-thinks it looks promising, given that a platform with wysiwyg and functionality similar to that of dreamweaver can only be accomplished by combining mozilla's editor (or open office's) with quanta, bluefish, or the like. There are a few (commercial) ones I have yet to try such as coffee cup, but overall it is a rather undesirable situation for those who prefer to layout tables without frazzling the brain.

Re:Looks promising

[Illbay]

Well, one thing that wasn't clear from Robertson's announcement: Is the resulting software "free"?

I mean, Lindows is REALLY all about that "Click-n-Run warehouse." It appears that's how they're makin' their jack. You can't just download the software you want, you have to pay for the privilege, just as you must pay for the OS.

So, can you get this NVU without paying a dime? That's one most "real" Linux users are used to seeing.

Re:Looks promising

[dtfinch]

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.

Re:Looks promising

[zapp]

Dude, Q104 starts next week.

Re:Looks promising

[Boltronics]

Macromedia tells you how to do it, but but it still requires PuTTY. I have to question how supported this configuration would actually be.

Re:Looks promising

[msh104]

they have to make the source code availible somewhere, so you can go and compile it yourself. Lindows.com is in no way responsible to distribute rpms, deb or even binairies at all. just the sourcecode. you are off-course allowed to package it yourself what many distro's are very likely to do because this is the only WYSIWYG website creator and many "i just want a website with my foto and a few lines of text, so fuck up with html" people like this kind of software very much. (and those are also the people lindows targets)

Re:Looks promising

[Afrosheen]

Doing it with Dreamweaver is a royal pain in the ass. I don't recommend anyone try it, you'll only lose hair, sleep, or both.

Re:Looks promising

[Afrosheen]

I can relate to number 3 from the known issues on that page. "throbber ugly and inactive". Yeah, mine is too. It's not a bug, it's a feature.

Re:Looks promising

[golgotha007]

heads up, the standalone composer is the WINDOWS VERSION ONLY.

there is a linux version there of composer++, which is dated in june and is coupled with a mozilla browser.

Re:Looks promising

[glacial23]

> With dreamweaver even SFTP dosn't come out of the box.

In Dreamweaver 2004 MX, it does.

Re:Looks promising

[Daengbo]

And there's apparently a major bug in version 3.1, too. I used it for the first time a on someone's recommendation. I usually use Bluefish.

I decided to add my files under a new project, followed a wizard, and clicked "Add File." After I had selected everything, I realized that some were folders and there was actually a button "Add Folders." So, wanting to be carefull, I clicked "Clear List," and a notification window appeared for a split second, saying "Deleting..." My heart dropped, and, sure enough, all the previously completed files that I wanted to add were gone.

Re:Looks promising

[Reziac]

How's the HTML the standalone version makes? (I tried building a page in Moz's composer, and found it made butt-ugly code with lots of problems.)

Re:Looks promising

[Daengbo]

The source and binary will be available here when the development build comes out.

This isn't right...

[Qweezle]

You wouldn't think the guy who was able to combine "The instability of Windows, with the complexity of Linux"(or was it the other way...) would be able to even have any ground on which to speak of Linux. Lindows has not been all it was once hyped up to be, and this guy isn't a Linux guru. Bah, he has no place to talk.

Re:This isn't right...

[BakaMark]

One would hope that this "frontpage" alike program does not come bundled with a number of addons to apache (like the real "frontpage" for Windows), that provides some neat and useless extensions to html pages (which you can do with PHP).

The result of these extensions will be security holes that you can "drive a truck through", just like the original "frontpage" extensions for IIS (you know the ones that enable to run code of the attackers choice under the same privledges as Apache).

People actually use those things?

[immanis]

I mean... They actually REALLY use them?

I thought every self-respecting geek just used text editors.

Re:People actually use those things?

[Gherald]

> People actually use those things?
> I thought every self-respecting geek just used text editors.

You just answered your own question. Nvu is for people, not geeks.

Re:People actually use those things?

[pheared]

Lindows isn't aimed at taking care of the needs of geeks.

Re:People actually use those things?

[DShard]

No, Nvu is for people who have never heard of the mozilla project.

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 :-).

Re:People actually use those things?

[ceejayoz]

So Mozilla Composer now has integrated remote file management, eh?

Where can I download this new version?

Re:People actually use those things?

[freeze128]

I thought every self-respecting geek just used text editors.

I tried to write a web page in a text editor once, but strangely, all I ever got was TEXT.

Re:People actually use those things?

[AstroDrabb]

I actually just installed Dreamweaver MX under Red Hat 9 today using Cross Over Office 2.1 for a friend. It installed and worked perfectly.

Re:People actually use those things?

[Stonent1]

Not every web designer is a geek. I've seen a few who migrated from desktop publishing to web site making. Most of whom were raised on the Mac and rarely if ever use any HTML.

Re:People actually use those things?

[Jugalator]

Nvu is for people, not geeks.

Thanks for so elegantly explaining that geeks are not a subset of humans. :-)

Re:People actually use those things?

[Gherald]

It was meant to be funny, I guess I didn't make it obvious enough.

Re:People actually use those things?

[ocelotbob]

From the screenshot posted further up the page, it looks just like mozilla's publish feature that's been there since forever. So, to answer your question, head over to mozilla.org and click on Mozilla 1.5 . Haven't played around with it too much, but hopefully, it makes less mess of included image files than frontpage does.

Re:People actually use those things?

[Afrosheen]

Dreamweaver is great software. I beta tested it wayyy back when win2k was new although I was running win98 at the time. It's too bad Macromedia has never taken linux seriously, other than to crank out a flash plugin once a year. At least in the 2 most recent versions of Dreamweaver they've included a semblance of php support.

You'll know that Linux has conquered all when the Macromedia apps are ported over.

Re:People actually use those things?

[Strudelkugel]

Michael's Minute: I recently received an email from a reader who noticed that FrontPage was used to create one of the web pages in use on the Lindows.com site.

At least now we know how he forms strategy.

Re:People actually use those things?

[onion2k]

What do you HTML is exactly?

Re:People actually use those things?

[bonch]

In all fairness, Frontpage 2003 is a hugely revamped improvement over what they've usually put out. It actually generates clean code. So if you're not going to be doing PHP or things like that, it's actually a very viable solution.

Dreamweaver MX 2004 is incredibly good, but damn, it sucks up resources on my laptop, especially when I have a lot of cells in a table.

Re:People actually use those things?

[Kyouryuu]

AFAIK, Macromedia's programs are supposed to work really well under Wine. Dreamweaver MX is reported to work just fine, except for the color selector under Properties causes a crash. But, in any case, a program of that complexity and nature shows that if Macromedia is not consciously supporting Linux, then at least they are rolling out some good, compatible code. ;)

Free to download just like Lindows?

[artios]

I would predict that this will not exactly be "free to download." Perhaps free to download with your subscription to Lindows.

Re:Free to download just like Lindows?

[madfgurtbn]

I would predict that this will not exactly be "free to download." Perhaps free to download with your subscription to Lindows.

You have heard of the GPL haven't you?

Actually this is Mozilla Public License, but still basically the same as GPL for most purposes.

I like the bottom of the Lindows page:

Copyright (C) 2003 Lindows.com, Inc. All rights reserved.
Lindows.com is not endorsed by or affiliated with Microsoft Corporation in any way - in fact, we don't even really like them because they are suing us.

Re:Free to download just like Lindows?

[ceejayoz]

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.

Re:Free to download just like Lindows?

[broeman]

well, be sure to use the right words. The GPL source code is to be distributed for free or at a non-profit price (e.g. CD + distribution). But it is true that if you sell binaries on a boxed CD, you could just include the sc on it. To get a big community (and survival in OSS words) the developers use the Internet for (free?) distribution and sharing with other developers (giving back improvements).

Re:Free to download just like Lindows?

[madfgurtbn]

You're right, of course. I should have been more specific in my previous post.

For some reason, whenever Michael Robertson does something with Linux/Lindows/whatever there are posts like the one I was replying to that say he is not going to supply source or that he has some nefarious scheme to become the next Bill Gates by using Linux or some other GPL software so it seems that every time there is a Lindows story on Slashdot, I have to remind someone that GPL still applies.

The BOFH's who populate Slashdot for some reason think that Michael Robertson's attempts to make a grandma-friendly distro and then market it to ordinary humans rather than uber-geeks is an affront to common decency.

I think he's on the right track, and should be getting some props around here for his efforts. LindowsOS is aggressively pursuing the home desktop market; no other distro is even trying.

Hopefully

[skank]

it will be more like dreamweaver, and less like frontpage. I can handle a tool that takes out a lot of the headaches from doing rollovers, adding scripting, and flash files. Dreamweaver was always great at that (I haven't messed with web design in a few years). But if anyone tries something as stupid as frontpage extensions, I hope the whole community laughs in thier face. From what I've seen from him, he is not stupid, just trying to make it easier for non-tech geeks to get away from windows, and this could be a good thing. I have had many people tell me one of the reasons for shying away from linux is (besides lack of cutting edge games) no easy wysiwyg html editors. Not everyone wants to lookn at the code. Granted, even when I used to use dreamweaver, the code always got cleaned up in homesite or notepad (thank god I use linux now) before it ever saw the net. This should work out to be a good move.

Re:Hopefully

[cca93014]

No mention of WEBDAV on their site. They should use something like that (i.e. standards based and not full of holes) if anything.

Re:Hopefully

[Pfhreakaz0id]

I realize folks are ragging on FP, but it brought web apps to the masses. No more paying your ISP to write PERL Cgi scripts if you wanted an interactive site.

Re:Hopefully

[IM6100]

Yeah, but the people ragging are the folks who used to extort^W^W earn money producing said Cgi scripts. No self-respecting geek wants to be replaced by a turnkey application that regular folks can use...

Re:Hopefully

[error502]

A geek who *can* be replaced by a turnkey application that regular folks can use is hardly a geek.

Re:Hopefully

[Quixotic Raindrop]

I have yet to see "the masses" making web apps. If you are talking about non-corporate website developers creating interactive sites, Perl has filled that niche for years, and PHP is making headway in that area. "The masses" don't do much beyond HTML email (which is done automagically by their email client, anyway), iCards and Blue Mountain, and possibly ImageReady and Flash. The most interactive that "the masses" get is passing virus-infected Flash games around.

The truth is that most people don't make websites or create interactive content. All FrontPage did was introduce security problems where no security problem had gone before.

Re:Hopefully

[Malc]

I hope he uses good cross platform code so that I can run it under Windows! ;)

Re:Hopefully

[cshark]

There are already reasonable wysiwyg editors for linux. Some of them are okay. What we NEED is a reasonable slicing program like Fireworks. At the moment, Fireworks is the only thing keeping me using Windows. I like Mike Robertson. He's an interesting cat. But he needs to understand that a little investment in R&D would further the cause a little more than repackaging existing stuff. That said, It's good to see someone do something to composer. It hasn't seen a major update in awhile.

Re:Hopefully

[Darren Winsper]

Err...he's paying for considerably more than a repackaging effort. Mozilla Composer's not that great, but what they're planning to turn it into looks like it's going to be fantastic.

Re:Hopefully

[16K Ram Pack]

Say what you like about FrontPage, but when I had to deliver a solution for content creation for a non-techy, it was my only choice.

This person was knowledgable at a "word user" level, and didn't want something where they had to put in HTML tags and the like. They have a real job to do apart from looking after the website.

They also wanted consistent look and feel, and to be able to have any new content automatically searchable - and to be able to add pages and get new menus.

Personally, I'd rather give them a content management system like Geeklog, but it's not as user-friendly as FP.

Any ideas however are gratefully received.

Re:Hopefully

[jacksonyee]

You have good points in your post, but as a fellow web developer, I just needed to comment on the rollovers headache. Modern browsers don't need any type of script for rollovers; a tiny bit of CSS will do. You can simply surround your rollover areas with <a class="Rollover"> elements and type

a.Rollover
{
background-image: url(normal.png);
}

a.Rollover:hover
{
background-image: url(hover.png);
}

saving code reuse, portability, and those of us who keep JavaScript disabled when we're forced to use IE.

Then again, if you're maintaining any type of website beyond a couple of pages, you're undoubtedly doing structure through server-side scripting. I just thought I'd throw the basic rollover concept out there for you though.

Re:Hopefully

[anomalous cohort]

I'm surprised that there hasn't been any posts to the affect of "hand coded is better" or "learning is good for you"

From a job skills perspective, tools come and go but standards are sticky. If all you know is frontpage or dreamweaver, then you will not command the salary that you could if you know HTML and CSS. Why? Because if all you know is the tool, then you are as dumb as the tool. Once you run into a situation that the tool doesn't cover, you're stumped. You are not an information worker, you are a repetitive tasks worker who just happens to be using a computer.

Regarding this tool, if the output is clean, then maybe the tool is worth using in the same keystroke saving way that generative programming is useful. If it is only of use to those too lazy to learn HTML and CSS, then it may be no more than a fascinating toy.

Re:Hopefully

[cshark]

You're right. I should read the site before commenting. Thanks.

mp3.com

[netbornmusic]

for sure Robertson has some commercial idea under it, as happens with all his projects. That happened with mp3.com(which was founded by Robertson). mp3.com was completely free innovative place at the beginning, and only after years it it became obvious, that the whole idea of it was to sell it for as big $ as possible...

Re:mp3.com

[ceejayoz]

Woah...

You mean he and his employees aren't doing this all for free for the good of the community?!?!

QUICK, SOMEONE CALL THE PRESS! THERE'S A COMPANY WITH A BUSINESS MODEL ON THE INTERNET!

</sarcasm>

Why?

[fermion]

Does Linux really need a program whose primary purpose is the creation of non-standard HTML that is guaranteed to only work in IE and is likely to crash any other browser?

I think creating a Golive clone would be much more useful.

Re:Who cares?

[mlk]

Emacs is the one true editor. Convert heathen!

It's Mozilla Composer

[Anonymous Coward]

Same ol' from Robertson and co, take an existing open source project, change a few graphics, and call it a revolutionary new product which will change the world.

Guy's got balls, I'll give him that.

Re:It's Mozilla Composer

[tsmoke]

That is *precisely* why this is cool. He's funded an existing open source project to make it better. According to the about section, they've contracted the lead Composer developer to extend and improve the existing code-base.

If the rubric for giving props to a company is building entirely new applications and products (and introducing all the bugs and problems that suggests) rather than supporting (with money!) existing projects, then only the companies that make the worst decisions will be applauded.

Re:It's Mozilla Composer

[l810c]

take an existing open source project, change a few graphics, and call it a revolutionary new product which will change the world.

Isn't this one of the main things we see in the Linux/Open Source arena? What is Mandrake? All of the Distros and other projects? The changes may have been minor to begin with, but eventually they grow into very different products. If he's putting resources and keeping it open source behind it might just turn into a nice editor.

Re:It's Mozilla Composer

[AstroDrabb]

Excatly. I think it is great for Open Source in general when commercial companies can use Open Source in/as their products. Open Source was never about the free as in beer (since the GPL,etc allow one to charge money), it has always been about the free as in freedom. The more companies out there that can build a successful busines from Open Source the better.

Re:It's Mozilla Composer

[mark-t]

But Composer does absolutely _squat_ when it comes to developing entire web _sites_. It's the organizational aspect of the software that makes it desireable... not merely it's web page editor.

Re:It's Mozilla Composer

[thenextpresident]

Yes, let's see:

1. Find a good open source project.
2. Fund it's developer's.
3. Continue to release the product under an open source license.
4. Make it a better product?

And that's a bad thing? That's right, let's curse all the companies that support open source projects.

Re:It's Mozilla Composer

[jargoone]

Didn't you get the memo? Supporting open source projects is good. But you're supposed to do it for free. Under no circumstances is money to be earned.

I didn't get the memo either, I just heard about it.

This is a good thing

[Anonymous Coward]

I congratulate the lindows team for launching this project.. clearly not aimed a linux geeks, but for the average lindows user. Those who use vi or emacs wont be using lindows anyway... thank you lindows for making linux more accessable to those who are fed up with windows

Re:This is a good thing

[flynt]

but for the average lindows user

The average usually isn't very meaningful when n=1.

Re:This is a good thing

[Saeger]

Uh, you'd be suprised how many people are "warezing" Lindows and Xandros (when RedHat, Mandrake and Knoppix are free/FREE and just as user-friendly).

--

Re:This is a good thing

[armando_wall]

"thank you lindows for making linux more accessable to those who are fed up with windows"

This looks like posted by a Lindows employee (or CEO?)

Frontpage??

[Anonymous Coward]

xmlns:w="ur n:schemas-nvu-com:nvu:editor"
xmlns="http://www.w 3.org/TR/REC-html40">

<head>
<meta http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">
<meta name=ProgId content=Nvu.Document>
<meta name=Generator content="Nvu 1.0">
<meta name=Originator content="Nvu 1.0">
<link rel=File-List href="hello_html_files">
<title>Slashdot Comment</title>
<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<o:DocumentProperties>
<o:Author>AC</o:Author>
<o:LastAuthor>AC</o:LastAuthor>
<o:Revision>1</o:Revision>
<o:TotalTime>1</o:TotalTime>
<o:Created>2003-10-30T03:05:00Z</o:Created&g t;
<o:LastSaved>2003-10-30T03:06:00Z</o:LastSaved>
<o:Pages>1</o:Pages>
<o:Characters>5</o:Characters>
<o:Lines>1</o:Lines>
<o:Paragraphs>1</o:Paragraphs>
<o:CharactersWithSpaces>5</o:CharactersWithSpaces>
<o:Version>10.2625</o:Version>
</o:DocumentProperties>
</xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<w:NvuDocument>
<w:GrammarState>Clean</w:GrammarState>
<w:Compatibility>
<w:BreakWrappedTables/>
<w:SnapToGridInCell/>
<w:WrapTextWithPunct/>
<w:UseAsianBreakRules/>
</w:Compatibility>
<w:BrowserLevel>MicrosoftInternetExplorer4</w:Brow serLevel>
</w:WordDocument>
</xml>
</head>

<body lang=EN-US style='tab-interval:.5in'>

<div class=Section1>

<p class=NvuoNormal>Like frontpage, huh?</p>

</div>

</body>

</html>

Re:Frontpage??

[sahonen]

Hahahaha, that's EXACTLY why I don't use any WYSIWYG editors.

Re:Frontpage??

[TummyX]

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.

Re:Frontpage??

[Cylix]

Um...

There seems to be alot of "garbage" options enabled with that particular instance.

I don't enable style sheets, I stick with apache targeted webservers and I don't use java/dhtml for placement.

In the end, I'm left with about 4 descriptive meta tags at the beginning. I remove those meta tags by hand and they are never reinserted. voila

There are definately flaws in frontpage, but really you shouldn't use such a poor example that can be shot down so easily.

Sticking to the basics, sometimes things can behave badly with regards to tables and other quirks.

It's alright and there isn't a great deal of competition with a similar feature set.

Re:Frontpage??

[Conspiracy_Of_Doves]

Frontpage 2003 infact has a function to clean word generated html

Wouldn't it be better if Word had a function to clean Word-generated HTML?

Re:Frontpage??

[arthurs_sidekick]

I'm not a huge fan of Dreamweaver, but it does not generate crap like that. 'Course, 98% of what I do is hand-crafted, using the code view. Hell, not even sure why I use it. Now, why are my web pages full of extraneous :xs ?

Re:Frontpage??

[IM6100]

I discovered something cool the other day.

I have decided to sell my copy of Office 2000 (it's a retail-box upgrade copy, so I CAN sell it) on Ebay since I don't 'fully use' it's 'power' anymore. So I decided I'd better stick a replacement on my Windows machine. I have a copy of Office 97 that someone I bought a SCSI drive from on eBay had thrown in for free- apparently he assumed I was buying the SCSI drive as an 'excuse' for an OEM copy of Office... anyway...

The Word included in Office 97 produces pretty damn clean HTML. I've used it to convert most of the .doc files on my hard drive into .html files. It doesn't do the XML bullshit that the Office 2000 Word spews out.

I am not sure if most people do or don't know this, but I find it pretty cool. I think Microsoft wasn't buying into and/or hadn't yet extend-embracing XML back at that point in history. And from my point of view, it's the perfect reason to downgrade my Office version.

That, and Office 2000 still has a little value I can wring out of it when I sell it to some poor fool on eBay...

Re:Frontpage??

[ceejayoz]

Disclaimer: I don't have Word 2003.

Isn't it entirely possible that Word 2003 does generate cleaner code, but the Frontpage 2003 clean-up feature is for Word HTML generated with older versions of Word?

Re:Frontpage??

[LordSah]

What a lot of folks don't realize about Word's ugly XML-html is that allows you to save a Word doc as html, reload it in Word and have no data loss. The formatting of your document that couldn't (or shouldn't) be expressed in a web browser (such as margins, page settings) is maintained. It's the ultimate in portability--the content is easily viewable anywhere (because browsers ignore all the crap they can't understand), and you don't sacrifice any of the niceties Word provides.

That said, Word isn't a very good web page generator. FrontPage is Microsoft's dedicated web page generator. If you're making a web page, use FrontPage.

Re:Frontpage??

[DavidLeblond]

They do, you just have to download it seperately.

clicky

Re:Frontpage??

[LordSah]

Word2003 lets you save as 'Web Page' or 'Web Page, filtered'. The filtered html is much cleaner than the standard html.

Re:Frontpage??

[smack_attack]

Use Dreamweaver MX or MX2004. It keeps getting better and works on OS X too.

Re:Frontpage??

[sahonen]

I actually used to use Dreamweaver, and I loved the code it generated. However, I found myself using code view a LOT more than the actual WYSIWYG tools, so I figured, why load a whole program just to use it as notepad? So I switched to notepad instead.

Now what I want is a tool with an integrated W3 checker, like MS Word's spell check. It'll save a ton of surfing to W3.net

Re:Frontpage??

[ceejayoz]

Thanks. :-)

Re:Frontpage??

[sahonen]

Well, gotta admit, if they're confident enough to put banner ads for it on Slashdot of all places, touting its non-code-mangling, they've gotta be pretty proud of it.

Re:Frontpage??

[LordSah]

I guess. :) I haven't noticed any FP banner ads. The last Microsoft ad I recall seeing on /. was for Visual Studio.

I have a copy of Office2k3, and I figured folks would be interested in FP's output.

Re:Frontpage??

[armando_wall]

I don't know how will NVU do, but Mozilla Composer generates pretty decent HTML code.

Re:Frontpage??

[sahonen]

Now I'd like to see what kind of code it puts out for an averagely-complicated page. If that looks good, well, stick the Frontpage developers on Longhorn and Linux will have a run for its money.

Re:Frontpage??

[AstroDrabb]

Now why does it look like you cleaned that up? *Every* HTML page I have seen produced by any MS product, i.e. visual Studio, Front Page, Word, sticks in a generator meta tag.

Also, it is pretty sad that what FP2003 put out with only the text

This was generated by FrontPage 2003

is still *not* standards compliant. Try to pass that page you posted through the W3C validator. It is missing a DOCTYPE tag.

Re:Frontpage??

[LordSah]

You're right. I'm stupid enough and I've enough free time that I create fictitious documents that are easily discoutable by anyone who has a copy of frontpage.

Go get a copy of frontpage 2k3 and try it yourself. Microsoft offers evaluation versions (although I don't remember if you download it, or get it on CD, like the Office2k3 beta).

Re:Frontpage??

[skiflyer]

Then you should just get the Web developer extension for Firebird. If your page is accesible on a publicly accesible site there's one click to verify.. plus plenty of other useful tools like outlining table (and custom) elements, loading the stylesheets in another tab, and so on and so on.

Re:Frontpage??

[ziggy_zero]

Have you not learned this yet? Microsoft deliberately cripples it's products so you have to buy more. They could easily make Word have the spreadsheet capabilities of Excel, and the flowchart capabilities of Visio, etc., but they don't because they want you to buy more software.

Re:Frontpage??

[AstroDrabb]

I don't have any MS OS's here at home so I can't try it. Whether you changed it or not, it still did not produce valid HTML. You need a DOCTYPE tag as the first element in an HTML document. Something like one of these:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2 Final//EN">
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">

Re:Frontpage??

[aonaran]

Now what I want is a tool with an integrated W3 checker
you mean like Mozilla composer?

Tools - Validate HTML

Re:Frontpage??

[sahonen]

I already have something called "checky" which tosses my page into the W3C from Firebird, but what I would REALLY like is one program to do all three tasks of letting me write, preview render, and W3 check my HTML. Currently, I'm alt-tabbing to Firebird and IE and hitting F5 in both. Multiply this action by dozens of times a hour and you can see why I hate it. Something that will automatically propagate changes I make to the HTML over to the IE and Firebird windows every few seconds, and underline any W3 no-nos I make... That would be perfect. Ahhh, I wish I were a programmer instead of an HTML script kiddie.

Re:Frontpage??

[mlk]

such as margins, page settings)
It can be, CSS can have multiply slytes, the one for printers include this information.
The one for text-to-speech includes location, and volume of the voice.

Re:Frontpage??

[sahonen]

Hmm, interesting, I might have to try that, thanks.

Re:Frontpage??

[mlk]

that sounds very like my emacs set up, ok it uses ispell (but does red-underline, and middle-mouse popup, not right).

Re:Frontpage??

[LittleBigLui]

yeah they could also bundle the whole office package with windows and give everything away for free.

they don't, and this proves that M1RC05uXX is teh 6HeY!!!1!

Re:Frontpage??

[k-zed]

People should really learn to author HTML with vim. (Knowledge of the HTML syntax itself is of course essential in this day and age.)

Re:Frontpage??

[cscx]

It, um, does.

When saving, choose "Web Page, Filtered" in the "File Type" drop-down.

"Saving Doc1.htm in this format (Web Page, Filtered) will remove Office-specific tags. Some Office features may not be available when you reopen this page. Do you want to save the document in this format?"

<html>

<head>
<meta http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">
<meta name=Generator content="Microsoft Word 10 (filtered)">

<style>
<!--
/* Style Definitions */
p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal
{margin:0in;
margin-bottom:.0001pt;
font-size:12.0pt;
font-family:"Times New Roman";}
@page Section1
{size:8.5in 11.0in;
margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in;}
div.Section1
{page:Section1;}
-->
</style>

</head>

<bod y lang=EN-US>

<div class=Section1>

<p class=MsoNormal>&nbsp;</p>

</div>

</body>

</html>

And that, folks, is today's Office lesson of the day.

Re:Frontpage??

[bonch]

Frontpage 2003 doesn't generate code like that. It's completely clean.

Re:Frontpage??

[Reziac]

I noticed the Word-style XML too. Ooops!

I haven't seen FP2003, how does it compare to FP2002? (Which is finally getting almost usable for my purposes, but I still need a clean "follow link" function that *switches to* the next page rather than opening yet another file.)

Re:Frontpage??

[Reziac]

I don't normally use the DOCTYPE tag, because I've found that once in a long while, this tag will cause some browsers to display the entire page as blank (delete just the DOCTYPE line, and the problem goes away!!) I'm more interested in making my pages uniformly accessable to all browsers (buggy or not, modern or ancient) than in being perfectly by-rule-correct.

Also, FP quit forcing a generator metatag as of FP2000. Before that, it did so with every file it opened. Now it has better manners. :)

Re:Frontpage??

[UID007]

What is kirwin's password?

It doesnt look promising it looks EXACTLY like moz

[Anonymous Coward]

The thing is just a rerelease of mozilla composer man.

You can start using it way before 2004, go to mozilla.org and download it today!

Re:Emacs

[mlk]

Emacs can work as a text editor? How do I enable that feature?

What we really need...

[rsilvergun]

is a Quickbooks replacement. Give me that and I could have every office in town running Linux. I mean, with it you can have a $25,000/year secretary do your accounting instead of a $60,000+ CPA (at least for small to mid-sized businesses). That's the killer app Linux is missing.

Re:What we really need...

[Daimaou]

I think that Appgen's MyBooks Professional is an excellent replacement for QuickBooks.

Check it out at Appgen MyBooks Professional

Re:What we really need...

[dan_bethe]

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.

Re:What we really need...

[KingOfBLASH]

The problem with apps like quick books is they have become the standard. So people are leery about switching (it's the monkey see monkey do attitude). Plus, while the lack of warranty or fitness of merchantability may not be bothersome for some software, payrolling is important. Most CEOs won't like hearing that their books are being balanced in software not guaranteed to work.

Re:What we really need...

[Malcontent]

"Most CEOs won't like hearing that their books are being balanced in software not guaranteed to work."

What software is guaranteed to work?

BTW. Most CEOs are too busy throwing parties on their 10 million yatchs to worry about software.

Re:What we really need...

[Barnett]

> is a Quickbooks replacement

Yes, you are right.
But for the time being, Quickbooks works just fine under WINE.

Barnett

Re:What we really need...

[Karma Star]

you really don't pay your secretary much, do ya? she must be a new import from mexico...

Re:What we really need...

[Bodrius]

As right as you are about needing a Quickbooks replacement, you have to be insane to put your 25K secretary to do the job of the CPA.

And you have to be a bit silly to ask her to do that on Linux if you can actually save that much money with Quickbooks.

Hint: a 25K secretary that knows how to use Windows & Apps is easier to find than one who is not terrified of Linux, or of a change in their screensaver for that matter.

If Quickbooks or similar apps let you cut off the CPA, why isn't every company doing that?

Re:What we really need...

[rsilvergun]

Last I checked, the auto update features and other network dependent features had some troubles. Is all that working now (it's been a while since I've checked)? It'd be great if it could be run seamlessly on WINE.

Re:What we really need...

[AstroDrabb]

Have you tried it under Cross Over Office? I know that Quicken runs under Cross Over Office 2.1 very well.

Re:What we really need...

[Barnett]

I used Quickbooks v5.0 under WINE and found no problems.

Re:What we really need...

[AstroDrabb]

And you have to be a bit silly to ask her to do that on Linux

This is just stupid. How is it *any* easier to show someone how to click an icon on the desktop under MS Windows then to do the same under Linux? You put an icon on the desktop of the secretary and tell him/her to "click" it. It doesn't get any easier then that.

Re:What we really need...

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you really that clueless or is this just a silly troll? Just for kicks, I'll assume it's the former.

If you buy software from, say, Microsoft or Intuit, there is a company who is saying "Buy this software because we guarantee it will work."

Since when? I've never heard of any software company that guarantees anything. Ever read a MS EULA? The only way you get any kind of guarantee is if you buy a support contract and you can do that for most major open source projects too. There is =no difference= here between GPL and shrink wrap software.

Some even have money back guarantees, some try to weasel out of them, but all can be sued if something bad happens.

That's a new one on me. If there is =any= case that you can cite where a software vendor was successfully sued for buggy code, I'd love to know about it. Software is inherently buggy and everyone knows it.

Here's how things work in the real world and if you're really the CEO you claim to be, you should pay close attention now. If you find a bug in your software that screws up your finances you can a) return the software in exchange for the purchase price, b) convince your vendor that the bug is real and get it fixed at his earliest convenience. You only get option b if you're running a version he still supports and that might not even be there if you don't have a support contract.

With open source software you can buy a support contract and get the =same= level of support you get from a software vendor PLUS you have the option of paying someone to fix your problems yourself if you don't want to be stuck waiting on somebody else.

In neither case do you get a guarantee.

Re:What we really need...

[222]

Gnucash

Re:What we really need...

[Sivaram_Velauthapill]

When people refer to CEOs, they generally mean medium to large sized corporations. Yes, small size companies have CEOs but that's not what people are talking about. Perhaps with the trend where the number of small businesses are increasing, it will change.

Otherwise, why else would I be willing to stay up working till 12:09 in the morning, and know I have to get up bright and early tomorrow morning?

Can't you say the same thing about a lot of other people? There are a lot of workers who work just like you do. They work long hours and get paid "little" for that extra work. In fact, a lot of software developers work very long hours and don't really get compensated (ask how many programmers have worked long hours and weekends). And how about those in other, poorer, countries where people work 12+ hours every day while all the benefits accrue to the executives and owners back in wealthy countries? Do you think when say ExxonMobil or Nike or whatever CEOs make a lot of money that there aren't workers who work even longer doing something you have never heard of, in some country you have never heard of?

The other thing people forget, is that there is no backup for the owner of a company. There is no unemployment insurance. I pay for my own medical insurance.

The reason it is like that is because you get compensated for it. Regular employees actually pay for unemployment insurance (it is not free). It seems free because it is subsidized (eg. when you work you subsidize someone else; when you don't, someone else subsidizes you).

And if the guy working for me screws up I do his job or I get in trouble-- because I can't say, oops, sorry, my subordinate screwed up. So we face intense pressure, risk, and work hard. Why shouldn't we be compensated?

Well, if you look around, you'll find that the CEOs actually manage to avoid the trouble. How many companies have gone from being profitable to a total loss? How many CEOs have destroyed companies? How many CEOs have been fired? Well, not many. Most CEO compensation actually "rewards" CEOs when they resign (they are never fired). It's called golden parachutes.

This all boils down to capitalism. Is there such a thing as "too much" compensation? If you are a capitalist, there is no such thing as someone being overpaid. Those that disagree with capitalism do subscribe to the view that some people are overpaid. Such people, like me, attach a value to a job. So it is hard for me to ever accept how say Micheal Eisner of Disney could have made $100million in one year (in the 90's) or how Grasso of NYSE could make $100million for deferred compensation (this year), when more "valuable" jobs (say police officers, or teachers, or scientists or whatever) get 100x less. Yes, this is a stupid view--but then again, I'm not a capitalist!

In any case, you are probably a "good" CEO. Most of what I said probably doesn't apply to you. Perhaps you will never engage in questionable ethics. Perhaps you will never get paid $100million in one year. Perhaps you work harder than anyone else in your company. But, there are many--I would claim majority--who aren't like you.

Sivaram Velauthapillai

Re:What we really need...

[Tony]

....but all can be sued if something bad happens.

Has this ever happened? I have *never* heard of an accounting software company, or even Microsoft, being sued for buggy or bad software, even when data has been destroyed.

Never.

The accounting software we use is not guaranteed, and we use a big small one. (Banner, from SCT.) I don't even think SAP is guaranteed to work.

Most contracts have words to the effect of, "If there is a problem with the program, we will do our best to help you recover lost data, etc, as long as your contract is up-to-date."

The GNU Public License, the BSD License, and just about every variation and incarnation of open source licenses states very clearly that the software is not guaranteed or warranteed in any ways.

And this is a great business opportunity for anyone at all, not just the producers of the software. You can form a company that will support and warrant the software. That's essentially what Red Hat and Suse and IBM does. It's a great business model, as it reduces the barrier to entry.

Re:What we really need...

[Malcontent]

"If you buy software from, say, Microsoft or Intuit, there is a company who is saying "Buy this software because we guarantee it will work."

Really? Have you ever read a EULA? Please provide one link to any software that either MS or Intuit makes where they claim to guarantee that it will work.

" but all can be sued if something bad happens."

Yes. Try to sue MS and see where that gets you. You will spend every dime you have while they grind you and your company into dust.

"Funny. I don't own a single yacht never mind 10 million, and I am a CEO"

I could tell that you were a CEO when you said that software from MS came with guarantees and when you stated that you could sue MS and hope to win. Most CEOs are pretty stupid like that.

The problem with you is that you are a CEO of a rinky dink company. Nobody really cares about CEOs of rinky dink companies like that. I too could form a company and call myself the CEO. All it takes is a few bucks to register a corporation.

"And if the guy working for me screws up I do his job or I get in trouble-- because I can't say, oops, sorry, my subordinate screwed up. So we face intense pressure, risk, and work hard. Why shouldn't we be compensated?"

No you are free and clear. The corporate shield makes sure of that. The corporation is an excellant tool for shirking personal responsibility.

BTW your employees also work hard and face intense pressure why shouldn't they be compensated like you too?

Re:What we really need...

[Sivaram_Velauthapill]

How? Why is there a difference? How do you know they are different? I know that you don't hear much about the private ones, but I imagine the same things happen there. I don't see how it would be different.

Sivaram Velauthapillai

Re:What we really need...

[Lumpy]

Quickbooks is a TOY accounting system. you need something like Champion Controller or Excalibur. a REAL accounting system.

your claim of "having everybody running it" is way off as most companies outgrwo quickbooks right away and no accountant will even touch it.

I can get Champion controller to run under wine on linux, but the most sucessful was getting the DOS version (GASP! most accounting software is still DOS BASED! or TEXT TERMINAL BASED!) to run on the server and having either el-cheapo wyse 75 terminals they had use it, or simply telnet into the machine to use it.

Quickbooks is a toy. WE need a FREE fullblown accounting system. Until then simply BUY the linux accounting packages that are available. I know of 3 of them that are quite nice.

Re:What we really need...

[Bodrius]

It is not any easier.

It's just more likely someone already did it before you.

And if you have had to teach a few secretaries to use Excel/Quickbooks/Access from scratch at any point in your life, you know you don't want to do it again if possible.

For them, it's specialized knowledge. They are not used to switch applications often, and you will be the one paying for that in terms of training, time, and wasted productivity.

Nice to know

[The Analog Kid]

atleast it will put out compliant HTML code. One more incentive to get people to switch.

Actually it will be EXACTLY like Mozilla Composer

[Anonymous Coward]

Mainly due to the fact that IT IS Mozilla Composer.

Damn, you gotta give the Lindows marketing department credit though, it does make the company look all innovative or something...

well, ok, not innovate per se, but at least productive...

Generated code

[tirenours]

Have you seen all the empty paragraphes at the end of the pages?

Have they used their NVu? :)

Re:Generated code

[ceejayoz]

Nvu = Newlines Very Useful.

Re:Look, it's fairly simple:

[bhtooefr]

You could just be too lazy to do HTML, or don't know enough to make it look better than the classic black on white, with blue links, and Times New Roman (or equivalent) of HOWTOs everywhere... (I do, it's just I'm too damn lazy, and I'd rather have something like FrontPage do the layout for me - that's why I'm using FrontPage and not some OSS app for my site)

html coders can still use it...

[obsid1an]

Why all the criticism for anyone wanting to use something other than notepad or vi? WYSIWYG webpage creators are still very useful even if you code your own html.

Re:html coders can still use it...

[The boojum]

Indeed yes. A good dreamweaver clone is something I've been missing from Linux. Personally, I'm an XEmacs fan myself, but I really do like using something like Dreamweaver for composing HTML. Yes, I can type it all out from scratch in a text editor but it's much faster to tweak it and make it look good using a WYSIWYG editor. Most text editors don't show you how your text looks with the images, for example, or how the layout will look. Used properly, something like Dreamweaver makes your pages much more fluid; you can drag and drop elements around till things look right without having to worry about whether you've forgotten to cut and paste a closing tag. You can highlight an entire column of a table and apply a CSS style to it, etc. Yes, you could do it all in a text editor, but which is faster?

I mean, sure, I could always just write assembly or even raw machine code instead of using a compiler. But do I really want to?

It's all a matter of using the right tool for the right job.

Re:html coders can still use it...

[twocents]

I will add that it is very nice to sit down with Dreamweaver and crank out some possible layouts using CSS, get some feedback from the client, and then transfer that design into some nice classes or functions, and then finish off with the dynamic content.

On top of that, Macromedia was one of the first of these types of editors to support jsp and php languages, as well as DAV as a method of file management. Not to mention that Dreamweaver MX supports sftp without the need for another application. And, lastly, Dreamweaver makes it very easy to work with the code, either in their editor or another editor.

While it's true that WYSIWYG tools can crank out some seriously bad html, let's give Macromedia some credit for listening to the people that use their product.

Re:html coders can still use it...

[DShard]

Look, you are on the most tech elite commment websites on the net saying that we should care what graphic designers need to put more inferior non conforming crap on the net. Consider the audience. Would you try to sell eskimos refrigators?

Re:html coders can still use it...

[Coolfish]

html coder?

no such thing. HTML isn't CODE, it's not a programming language. It's a mark-up language. Say it with me - Hyper Text Markup Language. Fancy way to present text. wooo. Don't delude yourself into thinking yer a "coder" if you know HTML. As such, trying to make yourself feel better by saying "I code pure html in vi!" is ridiculous - face it, yer not a coder, you might as well use wizziwig tools that make it easier.

Re:html coders can still use it...

[driptray]

Most text editors don't show you how your text looks with the images, for example, or how the layout will look.

And this is something that no one browser or WYSIJOPR* editor can show you either.

That's because the layout of the page is ultimately controlled by the user's browser, and in most cases you do not know what that is, or how it is configured. If you think that you, as the author, can exert absolute control over the look of a web page, then you are wrong.

As such, the idea of a WYSIWYG HTML editor simply doesn't make sense as it is quite irrelevant what You Get - the important thing is what your users get, and that will always differ. In fact, that's the point.

* What You See Is Just One Possible Rendering

Re:html coders can still use it...

[be-fan]

Java coder?

no such thing. Java isn't CODE, it's not a programming language. It's a business-logic language. Fancy way to tally sales. wooo. Don't delude yourself into thinking yer a "coder" if you know Java. As such, trying to make yourself feel better by saying "I code pure Java in vi!" is ridiculous - face it, yer not a coder, you might as well use a calculator that make it easier.

Re:html coders can still use it...

[Quixotic Raindrop]

From Merriam-Webster: "3 a : a system of signals or symbols for communication"

A code is a way to transmit information. Just because HTML is a code which describes meta-data about how the information in a document should be displayed does not render its language any less a code. Calling someone who writes HTML a coder is perfectly apropos; they use a code (HTML) to tell someone (web browsing client software) what something means (Wherever you see "<B> or <b>", make the text 'bold', whatever that means for your client).

Re:html coders can still use it...

[DShard]

Open code, whatever it may do is a Good Thing. The reason you don't see an open frontpage (For sake of argument) is the people who donate time to projects typically have themselves in mind as a main customer. I would say that most application developers targeting OSS fit in this category. The only argument you _may_ get someone to assist in development not targeting themselves is religous. Slashdot may be the perfect venue for that arg though.

Re:html coders can still use it...

[IM6100]

I was going to say something harping and snide about how Assembly Language isn't real code, but you did it better. Sorta.

Re:html coders can still use it...

[Sivaram_Velauthapill]

The reason you don't see an open frontpage (For sake of argument) is the people who donate time to projects typically have themselves in mind as a main customer.

I agree but would like to add one thing. A serious problem with open-source software is that there seems to be a lack of subject experts or just general users helping out. You'll find that nearly every project is driven by software developers. This is fine for "tools", but when it comes to some general application you really need users and other experts contributing. A lot of projects can be significantly improved if some major users started contributing with the design, etc.

Sivaram Velauthapillai

Re:html coders can still use it...

[The boojum]

Of course you're not going to make it absolutely pixel perfect with HTML. Anyone who expects precise layout is trying for desktop publishing and is better off using Quark or Framemaker or some other similiar tool.

What I meant was that a good WYSIJOPR tool can still let you rapidly pick an effective color scheme, make sure it doesn't clash with the images, see that it has a consistent overall feel, etc.

Any designer worth his salt should know better than to completely rely on the view provided by a WYSIWYG HTML editor. A good editor should let you rapidly prototype different possible designs and quickly reject most of the chaffe. Naturally, the next step is to test those on as many different platforms as possible.

Re:html coders can still use it...

[jcrowly]

The distinct lack of any form condition branching operators etc (the features of a programming language ) means that HTML is not a programming language. With HTML you produce documents, not interpreted or executed code. Would you call someone who uses a word processor a coder ? While we are not the subject of word processing if any one here used a wp in the 80's it resembled writing html quite a lot.

Example from View (a bbc micro wp from the 80's)

&bold&13&red Hello all

The above could be roughly written as <b><font size=13 color=red>Hello All</font></b> in html, however these day I would not use view or indeed a wp like view I would use a WYSIWG wp, and I suspect that the people who are proposing the use of VI for web page design would use a WYSIWG wp over one like view any day. This argument has happened before with all the same arguments however WYSIWG won and it will again and we will look back at this argument and see how silly it was.

Re:Who cares?

[Shulai]

Do you *ever* saw the complex layout of professional crafted, graphical designer authored web pages? It is almost impossible to do such things with a text editor, you need permanent visual feedback and visual editing.

It is good to be able to write HTML by hand. I do my own (simple) pages by hand, and I blame designers I worked with when their tables were inadequate to fill them with PHP code. But claiming that there is no need for good graphical HTML editors (Dreamweaver is the only one that currently really rates as good, BTW) is a nonsense.

Web authoring tool

[sloanster]

Sweet! more choices is always good -

and with this program, you won't get the rug pulled out from under you for dcma violations :(

Re:Who cares?

[zbyte64]

Vi is good for coding, but does not show real time design. Dreamweaver lets you modify by code, or by design thus increasing the productivity of the user. Ya sure it may not be 1337 thing to do, but lets face it, if linux is to ever become a desktop power, it needs easy to use applications, Vi is not one of them. Quanta is nice and is fairly easy to use, if you understand html. But Joe the average user probably does not even know what html stands for, let alone what it looks like. So many times have I told users to right click and view source, and then they type a reply like, "oh wow, thats soo complex." HTML seems to overwhelm the minds of the typical user, thus if this project ever suceeds, it will be a great contribution to linux. - Thats if you dont have to own a version of lindows or jump through some other hoop.

Nvu = Composer? (for now)

[Codeala]

FYI the second screenshot looks just like the standard Mozilla Composer "Publish Settings" screen. Of course Nvu's lead developer Daniel Glazman is the Module owner of Mozilla Composer (see his CV for details. For those who are interested NOW, just download a copy of Mozilla 1.5 and try out the much improved Composer. Hopefully we can see more improvement in Nvu and Composer with Lindows' sponsorship.

Re:Nvu = Composer? (for now)

[someguy456]

Better yet, use the composer that comes with Thunderbird. That's right, the new email/news client. I don't know if its supposed to be there, or will be taken out soon, but with Thunderbird 0.3, use "thunderbird -edit" (whereever you normally use "thunderbird") to start the composer.

Re:It doesnt look promising it looks EXACTLY like

[bhtooefr]

With web management. So, the editor may be Moz Composer, but some new stuff is on it.

This could be a GIANT leap forward...

[ZuperDee]

I know there are a lot of geeks out there who will blast this effort as unnecessary--they are the same people who believe the best HTML editor is really a text-editor with an HTML quick-reference sheet handy... These are some of the very same people who loathe the idea of ANYTHING that might pollute the open source world with Windows-like things--in short: anything that infringes on their idea of Unix-like purity. Sure, I too can edit HTML myself if I really wanted to.

However, I think this effort is a HUGE leap forward, not only because it is all open source, but because it is one more tool in the open source arsenal that can be used to fight back at the Microsoft camp.

The fact of the matter is, there are a LOT of people out there for whom FrontPage is absolutely indispensible. These are some of the same people who will be asking a very pointed and straightforward question about migrating to Linux: "Will Linux run something like Microsoft Office?" Just as we need an Office suite like OpenOffice or StarOffice, I think it is high time we had a complete website authoring tool. People from all walks of life, both those in the professional world as well as those doing it just as a hobby, could benefit.

Re:This could be a GIANT leap forward...

[Brandybuck]

I've never used Frontpage, so I don't really understand what the big hoopla is. I can certainly understand people wanting a WYSIWYG html editor. But why doesn't Mozilla fit the bill? What would Nvu provide that a Mozilla with a few more features could not?

Note that I am not arguing that Nvu efforts should be directed towards Mozilla. Rather, I am wondering why you think this is a "HUGE leap forward". Not having ever used Frontpage or Dreamweaver, I seek enlightenment.

Re:This could be a GIANT leap forward...

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Well, I'm kind of in the middle ground. I do "believe the best HTML editor is really a text-editor with an HTML quick-reference sheet handy," at least right now -- because I have yet to find any HTML editor that consistently produces clean, maintainable code. Right now, the code turned out by any (allegedly) WYSIWYG HTML editor I've seen is simply crap.

If this project turns out to be at least a partial fix for that problem, I'll applaud it. I'd give it better odds than any of the proprietary systems, simply because it is OSS; that means the authors aren't beholden to any one browser (or even any one HTML rendering engine) and, one can hope, have an idea of what it's like to write clean HTML by hand.

Re:This could be a GIANT leap forward...

[Saeger]

The trend now is using content management systems (nuke,wiki,tiki,blogs,gallery,etc.) to do most of the boring drudgework, and then plugging in some pretty theme/CSS. This is easier than WYSIWYG editing, and much easier than raw HTML editing.

I've helped a few photography friends move over from doing manual updates with notepad+ftp/Frontpage to MovableType + gallery, and it seems like more ISPs have these available as ready-to-go "features" these days, so no nerds are required.

--

Re:This could be a GIANT leap forward...

[chill]

Frontpage does more than just create quick web pages. It also handles website management, including permissions, collaboration, showing relationships between files, dead & broken link checking, file transfers, etc.

It also produces some of the most mangled, broken HTML code I've ever seen -- short of HTML exported from Excel or Word. I've spent more time cleaning up the HTML than saved on the quick layout features.

Actually, Quanta Plus does most, if not all, of that. Once 3.2 is released, it'll have a frames wizard, WYSIWYG editing and other features as well.

Re:This could be a GIANT leap forward...

[rmohr02]

I know there are a lot of geeks out there who will blast this effort as unnecessary--they are the same people who believe the best HTML editor is really a text-editor with an HTML quick-reference sheet handy...

Bah! Nerds don't need "quick-reference" sheets for HTML!

Re:This could be a GIANT leap forward...

[LittleBigLui]

with an HTML quick-reference sheet

what for?

while they're at it

[pizza_milkshake]

where are the open source versions of Clippy and MS Bob?

Re:while they're at it

[Evil Adrian]

Funny, except that this program is actually useful. It's targeted at web designers, most of whom are not geeks.

Re:while they're at it

[xRizen]

I'm sure you could make a Clippy with GDesklets. :o

Re:while they're at it

[IM6100]

I recently installed Open Office 1.1 and noticed a little graphical 'help' window with a picture of a little 'character fellow' popped up in the lower right corner of my document when I turned on 'help.'

Yep. There's a little imitation of 'Clippy' in the new Open Office.

Re:while they're at it

[mlk]

Vigor!

I HATE FRONTPAGE!

[suso]

Having done a presentation on Frontpage Extensions and Apache at ApacheCon, I can officially say that the Frontpage system of doing things sucks ass in the Microsoft way.

I'm welcoming any open source replacement.

Re:It doesnt look promising it looks EXACTLY like

[molarmass192]

Looks like a few XUL based enhancments. Not that that's a bad thing but the majority of this is based on work the Mozilla devs put in.

Re:It doesnt look promising it looks EXACTLY like

[millette]

Thanks - you saved me from reading the article :)

Re:Look, it's fairly simple:

[msobkow]

Sounds like sour grapes to me. You probably just realized Mozilla Composer does 99% of anything useful that FrontPage does, costs nothing, and produces HTML that even works with more than one browser!!!

Or you could learn enough HTML to realize the display layout of a default page is configured in the browser, not forced by the document. Lo and behold, all those "ugly" HOWTO's look just the way you like them.

Finally a reason to switch...

[rice_web]

I messed around with Mandrake 9.1 for a while (had to go back to Windows after wireless card troubles). I would have been more inclined to remain with Mandrake had I had a decent web editor.

The same applies to MANY people.

The lack of professional applications on Linux has kept many supporting Microsoft over the years, simply because they have no alternative.

I'm not quite ready to abandon Photoshop and learn GIMP, but Linux is moving one step closer to becomming a viable desktop option for everyone.

One big improvement

[dafz1]

Why do they(Nvu, Macromedia, etc.) insist on using FTP to update remote sites? SSH would be a lot more secure.

Sarcasm and self-importance aside, there is some validity to "if they need a gui, they shouldn't have a web site". The average Windows user has little to no need for web page design software. Having said that, it's good that Lindows is creating tools for your average Windows user. Making "idiot proof" apps is the best way to get Windows users to use Linux.

Re:One big improvement

[Anonymous Coward]

i agree, i Linux Linux and want to see it grow, i praise Michael Robertson for this project, and wish him luck on it, maybe Lindows will help too, i just wish the deal about letting users get root access will be improved so new users will get the idea of security via restricted root access...

Re:One big improvement

[Codeala]

Most ISPs are unlikely to support SSH login for users to upload their files, so FTP is still the best option.

Re:One big improvement

[man_ls]

I use Dreamweaver to create the "stripped HTML" pages I use, as the backend of my php-driven site.

I don't feel like mucking around in Notepad/PFE to write my content. That's for writing my scripts, the most important part.

Content is done fine with a WYSIWYG editor.

That doesn't make me a luser, however.

Re:One big improvement

[muzza]

Because a lot of ISP's (like mine iinet.net.au) only support FTP and do not allow shell access to the web hosting servers.

As to why ISP's still insist on forcing ftp on their customers... I have no idea :)

Re:One big improvement

[RealisticWeb.com]

Why do they...insist on using FTP to update remote sites? SSH would be a lot more secure.

Dreamweaver MX supports ftp with SSH encrypted login as well as RDS, SourceSafe, and WebDAV.

Re:One big improvement

[Tagren]

What about the 'mother' that don't have time to learn html/ftp. But want to show the world her *insert whatshelike*?

This type of talk about computers is for nerds only is not helping Linux. A computer is good if anybody can use it. It is even better if anybody can use it without breaking it.
The uber computer let you choose wich part you want.

Re:One big improvement

[christopherfinke]

i agree, i Linux Linux and want to see it grow

Yeah, well I once smurfed a smurf when i smurfed that a smurf was smurfing! Can you smurf that?

Re:One big improvement

[YrWrstNtmr]

Sarcasm and self-importance aside, there is some validity to "if they need a gui, they shouldn't have a web site". The average Windows user has little to no need for web page design software

Similarly, "If they need an IDE, they shouldn't be programming. Straight machine code or nothing." There is some validity to learning the basics, but if a tool can effectively abstract some of the tedium (much as a compiler does) then good.

I thought one of the main things about this whole new online thing was 'Everyone gets to publish'.
Not just you, or those you deem worthy by having learned some arcane keypress sequence, or not just geeks.

Everyone.

It's about time

[r_benchley]

Jesus, there's less than a hundred posts and there are already people trying to act cool and knowledgeble by saying that they do all of their HTML coding in vi and Emacs. Good for you. No wonder your web pages look like shit. Have you take a look at www.gnu.org lately? Lots of great info, but it's uglier than sin. People who design great looking websites usually do a quick layout in Dreamweaver, and then finetune the HTML in vi, Emacs, BBEdit, etc. Best of both worlds.

Re:It's about time

[RealisticWeb.com]

I couldn't agree more. To me there are two reasons to use a WISIWYG editor. Style and time. Without a doubt if you design your web site graphically with visual layout tools it will end up looking much better. Not only that, but I promise that it will save you a LOT of time. Have you ever made a page with a complicated nested table structure? You could spend hours saving, alt-tabbing, and refreshing to get it to do what you want it to. Add to that any dynamic element such as rollover images and you could spend all day on one page. With Dreamweaver or something similar, it will take minutes. More developers need to realize this fact. Don't let Dreamweaver handle your database connections and record sets, do the back end code yourself in emacs or whatever, and use Dreamweaver to do the graphic front end.

Re:It's about time

[nicky_d]

I have just looked at gnu.org, as suggested; it's cleanly arranged, valid XHTML. I wouldn't say it was ugly, and I certainly wouldn't say it was 'shit'. What I'd describe as 'shit' pages generally tend to have emerged from some GUI editor like DW, FP or even Word, and are stuffed with unnecessary features and masses of behind-the-scenes text. As an example, a page produced where I work uses Flash buttons for animations, simply to achieve a rollover effect, and the buttons just contain text. It's like that because that's the way Dreamweaver guided its author to create it. Now, I'm not saying that's purely DW's fault - I know that DW can be a very useful tool, and like any tool it can be used well or used poorly. But I do think that in order to use DW well - and by well I mean creating conformant and accessible pages, not simply 'great looking' ones - you need to be well versed in the program itself AND (X)HTML, just as you do if you're creating hand-coded pages in vi or Notepad. The difference is that vi and Notepad don't lob in chunks of code on your behalf; while such a feature can be a Godsend, it can just as easily be a curse.

Re:It's about time

[misterhaan]

gnu.org isn't ugly, it's just simple. there's a big difference (namely, that simple is much easier for people to agree on than ugly, as ugly depends on personal preference).

personally i have only onced used vi and never emacs, but i write all of my html/css/javascript/php/asp/whatever else is needed in a text editor with appropriate coloring. and i think i can probably code up a better looking and better working page in the same time as it would take for someone to do a quick layout in some sort of wysiwyg html editor and then edit it later and still have some problems to work out.

so yes, i think that coding by hand is the best option, but at the same time a wysiwyg editor is going to be something a lot of people who can't code by hand will want. people who design great looking websites, on the other hand, should not be using any sort of editor. especially with the way all the editors i've seen in action generate messy/useless code. then again this is the one editor i'd expect to output code closest to what a good html coder would write.

Re:It's about time

[Requiem]

Are you kidding? gnu.org is useable. It's standards-compliant. For Christ's sake, this is what the web should be! Get those two down, and then add the sugar!

Re:It's about time

[Reziac]

Simple and plain doesn't necessarily mean ugly. Simple and plain is great for text-heavy presentations.

However, you're right on one point -- I've seen a lot more oopsie-type coding errors on hand-generated HTML, most commonly missing table tags or badly nested formatting tags -- errors that a decent HTML editor won't LET you make in the first place (or at least will fix for you).

Myself, I use an editor (mostly WYSIWYG but with raw mode on demand) to do all the grunt work, then tweak by hand as I see fit.

Re:It's about time

[greysky]

Dreamweaver does make nice looking pages, but they are often difficult to manipulate. The code it creates expects a certain amount of content or else it looks way off. It may not sound like a big deal, but try taking a couple dozen interfaces that someone else developed in dreamweaver and make the content area run out of a database. You practically have to go through the whole page and re-write the dreamweaver code to be less rigid. And don't get me started on nested font tags.

Re:And Guess What?

[DAldredge]

He is talking about EDITORS, not OS's!

Re:What we really need... gnucash?

[gradedcheese]

gnucash?

Re:why?

[frodo from middle ea]

Seriously, WYSIWYG asides, Why would I bother with an IDE, editor etc, that won't support VIM key bindings.

Just another editor for me to waste time pressing the ^[:wq!

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:Exactly

[boneshintai]

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.

Or you could write your page in the ISO-8859-1 character encoding rather than US-ASCII (you should be anyways, even if you're only using english), which has accented characters at U+00C0 through U+00FF (with interspersed non-accent characters). Not knowing how to use the tool is not the same thing as having a bad tool.

Aside: Slashdot's comment box only allows characters in the printable range of US-ASCII, so I can't include any examples here. Try Everything2's LATIN-1 writeup.

Re:Exactly

[AstroDrabb]

WYSIWYG HTML editors are very useful to get most of your interface done FAST

I agree. Where I work, my team and I are responsible for the enterprises Java frame work and all of the applications, servlets and the guts of any jsp pages that interact with it. Then there is a group of the "Dreamweaver" guys who really make everything look nice and easier to use for the end users. If it was left up to me and my team to do the desinging as well as the coding, it would function great but be fugly and hard to use. The only rule we impose on the designers is that they DO NOT use front page and that their stuff works in Mozilla as well as IE.

Re:Exactly

[glazou]

Sorry to say, but this is big news to me ; and I am listed in the authors of the HTML 4 spec...

You can always change de default charset of your doucment and type your document using that charset. Switch to iso-8859-1 (aka isoLatin-1) and you'll be able to save your docs as your type them without having to use entities for diacritics.

Re:Exactly

[forcery]

A problem I have had with this, however, is that after transferring files containing for example a between platforms (I use Mac OS at home and Windows and Linux at work), the characters get messed up when trying to edit them.

This is probably a problem which can be fixed by setting some shell / terminal settings, but as more or less of a newbie for that kind of stuff, it's irritating.

Re:Exactly

[Carewolf]

Surry, doesnt always work. It is much safer to use the HTML-digraphs, or whatever you call them. (UTF-8 works somewhat better because it can be autodetected, but older browsers still suck)

Re:Exactly

[julesh]

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

There are a large number of text editors that will let you just type in what you want, highlight and choose an option (like mine has, 'Text to HTML entities') that will convert anything that needs converting to the right format. Really, there are many tools besides WYSIWYG editors that can solve most of the problems with hand coding HTML.

Credit where credit is due

[MAXOMENOS]

Say what you want about the quality of the Lindows product -- these guys understand what it means to give back to the community. Good for them.

Re:Mnyeh

[Quixotic Raindrop]

Wow. How do you get your head through doors?

Emacs (or vi, for the enlightened) is fine if you do little bitty websites. It's even fine if you want to php your website. But if you are only one of several people who provide content, a large number of whom are (*gasp*) writers or graphic designers by trade, and think that PHP is what ravers use to stay up all night long, Emacs and vi won't cut it. Now, this is a development. Not as big of a development as when it is actually ready, but still a development.

Re:why?

[bakes]

You forgot to put in the link

Hallilujia!

[E-Rock-23]

This is a long time coming, and finally, it's been announced! Happy day! This is a godsend, especially for a small peanuts web author like myself.

I've been told Dreamweaver runs under WINE. I've tried it with many different kernels, builds, distros... All with no success. Now that a program to rival Dreamweaver is in the works, my days of being stuck in Winblows hell are almost over. This was the only thing stopping me from totally migrating over to Linux...

Thank you!

Re:Hallilujia!

[bagboy]

>>>>I've been told Dreamweaver runs under WINE. I've tried it with many different kernels, builds, distros... All with no success.

Try it with Codeweaver's Crossover Office... Now works with Dreamweaver MX and a steal at 59.95 (also runs Office XP/2000/97 Photoshop, etc....)

This is much better than having to run Windows and the app... Check them out... codeweavers.com

Re:Hallilujia!

[E-Rock-23]

Gracias. I'll have to check that out...

Re:Emacs

[DShard]

ctrl-meta-c k meta-p 1 1 ctrl-v shake it all about, you do the hockey pokey and turn yourself around. AFAIK that's what it's all about.

Think that this will run on X11 under Mac OS X

[rafiki_1234]

Mac OS X needs another WYSIWYG editor and site manager. Dreamweaver sucks (too slow) and Adobe GoLive has an overly complex interface. Something like this would be a welcome addition to my Mac!

Macromedia should just port DWMX for Linux

[sfhc]

I personally think DWMX is a great program. It greatly improves productivity. Of course I will state that if the new thing is the least bit front page, then it is worth of some critisism. DWMX is very customizable. Therefore I use it to generate clean and w3 compliant code. I have also customized it to deal with php and other langs just fine. If some one has thought of something similiar for Linux, more power to them. Saying vi or emacs only is just BS. In the real world, speed, efficiency and ease of use beat out idealism.

Re:Macromedia should just port DWMX for Linux

[rsklnkv]

That may be YOUR 'real world'. Some folks, however, remain true to their ideals and eagerly await a free (as in beer) app.

Re:Macromedia should just port DWMX for Linux

[bagboy]

Try it with Codeweaver's Crossover Office... Now works with Dreamweaver MX and a steal at 59.95 (also runs Office XP/2000/97 Photoshop, etc....)

This is much better than having to run Windows and the app... Check them out... codeweavers.com

Re:Mnyeh

[frodo from middle ea]

Sorry , but this talk is about editors, not OSes.

Now only if you were using VIM...

Someone should write a Java HTML interpreter...

[herrvinny]

That's great that MS FP will have an opensource competitor, but while they're at it, could they write a HTML display engine for Java? Seriously, Sun's built in Java HTML engine sucks. Can't use anything except the most basic HTML elements, and even those behave a little wacky. I know Java would be whole lot more useful if I could write help pages in HTML, then display them inside a Java application.

Way OT: Re:What we really need... is more stuff..

[Anonymous Coward]

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. /snot....

LOL

[arcadum]

A true Vi troll

Re:why?

[JeffTL]

I'd have to agree. There are already three GREAT free-software editors; nano, vim, and even emacs, anyone?

Linux already it

[Ice_Balrog]

Linux already has "a complete Web Authoring System for Linux Desktop users to rival programs like FrontPage and Dreamweaver". It's called vim. And it p0wns FP and Dreamweaver. DISCLAIMER: It's a joke. Laugh.

Re:Linux already it

[SomeOtherGuy]

Not a joke. I actually prefer Vim to anything.

Re:Linux already it

[PopCulture]

give vim a point and click ftp menu, and a local directory that maps to the web directory and yeah, sure, vim is almost as good as dreamweaver in what dreamweaver like apps are designed for.

almost.

you can use vim for writing the next great novel, data entry, VB.net development even... that doesn't make it the best tool for the job, which is exactly what IT professionals are paid to know and use.

Can you honestly tell me using vim is a faster and more efficient solution than Textpad / Macromedia / Frontpage / [insert more advanced tool here] or any alternative? If you bothered to learn any of the alternatives to the extent you know vim, I guarantee productivity would increase.

Re:Linux already it

[BurKaZoiD]

I like Code Crusader myself.

Re:Linux already it

[PopCulture]

http://www.textpad.com/add-ons/index.html

ftp functionality, and tons of other tools available as Textpad modules are why I included textpad as an alternative to vim.

Re:Linux already it

[SomeOtherGuy]

Do textpad, dreamweaver, frontpage work in an ssh session? Do textpad, dreamweaver, frontpage work on almost any OS known to man?

The reason I got used to vi or vim if possible is because you can count on it being anywhere -- local, remote, you name it....No matter what box I was on EVER -- I could type vi filename.html.

Re:Linux already it

[PopCulture]

Do textpad, dreamweaver, frontpage work on almost any OS known to man

well, shit. I guess you got me there.

seriously, i am an idiot :)

one fish, two fish, red fish...

[ubiquitin]

BlueFish has occupied this space for quite some time. The spin is vintage Michael Roberson of course. We've been here before, people. He's an early adopter with a megaphone that's twice the size of yours. After all, HE KNEW ABOUT MP3 BEFORE YOU DID.

There are times I'd really wish that the tech media would genuinely research the subject matter instead of just amplifying hype. Hard-working, often-silent open source incumbent projects deserve nothing less.

Re:one fish, two fish, red fish...

[Otter]

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.

Re:one fish, two fish, red fish...

[pair-a-noyd]

Cool fish.

Thank you sir. I've been looking for something and it was on CD #2 all this time... (mdk)

Re:one fish, two fish, red fish...

[YrWrstNtmr]

Bluefish is also a "...powerful editor for experienced web designers and programmers."

This new Lindows/Mozilla hybrid site manager tool may be something for the rest of the population to use.

Re:one fish, two fish, red fish...

[nutbar]

If you had ever actually used bluefish you would know that it is an HTML text editor, not a WYSIWYG web site builder. Sure, it is great - hell, I love it and use it - but it is in a completely different arena than front page.

Whoa. Hold on. (revision)

[Shaman]

Quanta is simply bloomin' awesome right now. NO NEED for some half-baked piece of crap that has less features than it has. Which will be just about anything.

They should throw those developers at making Quanta better instead - it doesn't need much more to start making waves.

Composer++

[pmsyyz]

Hmm, Mozilla (standalone) Composer and Composer++ is nice.

I guess the editing on the server thing might be the thing missing. Don't you have to have a server side component to do it right?

Re:Who cares?

[trg83]

Even with graphical editors, you can tell which web pages were created by people with no sense of how the web works. How it looks in your local layout window is nothing compared to factors such as load time, accessibility issues, font choices, etc. As someone who has extensive experience with designing web pages and web-enabled database applications in a production environment, I have done rough prototypes of pages to show managers in Dreamweaver or Adobe GoLive. When it comes to fine tuning and ensuring common elements between pages are presented in the same way, ONLY a text editor can provide the control necessary to accomplish the task. It is almost more work to change a WYSIWYG page to fit your needs than it is to start with a text editor in the beginning. Keep in mind that many mistakes are prevented by using web-aware editors that have menus to rapidly insert tags. The value of syntax highlighting for different types of elements can not be overstated either.

Furthermore, why are people who do not know what they are doing creating web pages? If you want your company to be perceived as one that half-asses everything, have one of the business guys make the web page. I don't volunteer to work on the company financial statements. Likewise, the web page should be left to those with expertise. It is a common belief that anyone can make a web page. That is true. However, can just anyone make a web page that presents your company in the light you desire? No.

One may counter that perhaps the web pages made by this new editor would be for personal use. With few exceptions, personal web pages lack significant content and are a waste of bandwidth. For these, the poorly produced HTML code of Microsoft Word are probably sufficient anyway.

What About Composer?

[querencia]

Mozilla Composer is no match for Dreamweaver right now for WYSIWYG web page dev. As an open source developer who desparately wants this project, should I work on Mozilla or this new thing? I can't find anything on the Mozilla roadmap that says they're moving in this direction. Anybody know something I don't?

Re:What About Composer?

[PinkX]

The nvu FAQ states explicitly that it's based off Mozilla Composer....

Re:What About Composer?

[querencia]

Ummm, yeah. That's my point. nvu is taking the Composer project, improving it and adding new functionality, and releasing it as nvu. So, we'll have two software development processes going at the same time: Composer and nvu.

As with any open source codebase "branch", developers have to choose which branch they're going to support. Looks like nvu is serious about becoming a Dreamweaver replacement. Is Composer?

Free to download?

[JanusFury]

Free to download, cool. That's nice.

But will it run on anything other than Lindows? Considering Lindows costs money, saying that Nvu is free to download and neglecting to mention that it only runs on Lindows wouldn't be something I'd put past Robertson.

It's like how MS offers IE 'free to download' (or used to) but it only runs on Windows - big deal, you have to buy Windows to get it.

Re:Free to download?

[cranos]

Umm, not sure if you are being deliberatly dense or you honestly are not aware, but Lindows is LINUX.

So its a fair bet that you will be able to get it to run on any flavour of Linux you choose.

Re:Free to download?

[JanusFury]

Mac OS X is BSD. Does Safari run on FreeBSD?

Re:Free to download?

[BenjyD]

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.

Re:Free to download?

[cranos]

OS X is not just BSD, it is a conglomerate of BSD and proprietry software. It is a completely different beast than Lindows which is another flavour of Linux, not another OS that just happens to use the Linux Kernel.

Re:Free to download?

[elgaard]

Yes there are non-free parts in Lindows. E.g. Staroffice and Netscape (not sure if its still there). But most is normal Debian. Even the Lindows-specific software are deb packages.

I think we can be pretty sure the Lindows source can be compiled to a standard debian package or installed as a linux tarball.

Re:Who cares?

[pyrrhonist]

"Ed is the standard text editor."

Re:Who cares?

[SteamedPenguin]

What utter crap. This is just utter nonsense. That's like claiming you can only write good programs using MSFT Visual C++ Ahem, how about not treating HTML like a layout language but treating it like the markup Language it is. Also, unless you are some throwback to the nineties there is no need for these the WYSIWYG editors when you use CSS.

Re:Way OT: Re:What we really need... is more stuff

[EverDense]

Does it include any quality control systems for manufacturing?

Re:lindows sucks ..

[jbolden]

Lindows is nowhere near as good as Xandros

glad to see it

[WindBourne]

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.

Re:glad to see it

[ender81b]

To be fair dreamweaver MX produces, by far, the best code. while it might look like crap 99.999% of the time it is w3c compliant.

And, supposedly, Frontpage 2003 is *alot* better nowadays. Haven't used it so I can say for sure.

Re:glad to see it

[abertoll]

I think there's a practical reason why they make "ugly code" ... the more crap they add to the code the fewer people they have figuring it out. Sure in the world of those who know this is stupid, but if the common user opened a FrontPage created html file with notepad, he would forever give up actually trying to write html himself and stick with programs that do this forever.

And as per the comment about people who use HTML make pages that are ugly:

1) Often people who use html make really excellent pages... which are functional too. In fact the best dreamweaver pages I've seen have been made with simplicity in mind and could easily have been written by hand. Just because maybe pages like gnu.org and my own are kind of ugly doesn't mean that HTML by hand = ugly pages.

2) HTML pages made by hand are often best viewed on "any browser" including lynx.

Re:glad to see it

[sehryan]

Not to be picky, but Dreamweaver's code is cleaner than most people could make by hand. Please don't lump Dreamweaver in with Frontpage and Office. Thats like putting Photoshop in with MS Paint.

Re:glad to see it

[Reziac]

Actually, that's the kind of class I'd like to take. The HTML itself is easy enough, but I want to get more proficient in using the higher-end *tools* like FP and DW, because of the efficiency angle when you're doing a whopping big site where managing the beast is more of an issue than merely writing the individual pages.

FP now makes reasonably clean code, but DW's seems to get worse with every version. :( But at least DW-MX finally has an interface that's not solid clutter.

I did try Moz Composer (as of Moz v1.5, I think), and the amount of cleanup the resulting page needed was so bad that I finally threw it out and started over.

BTW for individual pages and to get *clean* code, I use old AOLpress (freeware). Sure wish its source would get released!!

Re:Exactly-Outsourcing the click.

[Rajesh Gupta]

Excellent ! If Americans can't find a way to remain globally competitive by adopting a software paradigm that's bound to work in the future, we Indians will gladly welcome more of your investors.

Capitalism means grow or die. If you can't get a clue on how the world doesn't have to spin around the US' little finger anymore, you deserve to get your jobs outsourced.

Re:Look, it's fairly simple:

[YOU LIKEWISE FAIL IT]

don't know enough to make it look better than the classic black on white, with blue links, and Times New Roman (or equivalent) of HOWTOs everywhere...

That's the way it is supposed to be. If you want it in Verdana, you set it that way in your browser. If you are vision impaired and need large fonts with high contrast, you should set it that way.

Visual presentation of HTML should be left up the end user. Presuming they're even utilising your markup in a visual sense, and not via an accessibility browser. HTML was supposed to be accessible, it was never designed to be the pretty-printer we've shoehorned it into being in the last years since the explosion of non-academic web usage.

Rant aside, I do understand your point, and realistically, people want their pages to be beautiful. But just because people are making their webpages simple and in the default 'flavours' doesn't mean that they don't understand HTML. Exactly the opposite in many cases.

( As an aside, I try to provide pages with a very simple visual style and then provide a few different CSS or XSLT sheets as appropriate that can be used to render the content with.

I've noticed that some browsers now allow the user to apply a stylesheet of their choice to either all pages ( Safari ) or to the current page ( Mozilla ). This is a fantastic idea that deserves wider exposure. The missing piece is now to allow users to save a stylesheet matched to a given URL when they wish to view that page again. Of course, by the time I write this, Mozilla may well have this feature.

If you'd like to support users of these features, add classes to your html elements, even if you don't plan to use CSS yourself. Thanks. :-) )

Alternative

[blackwing0013]

If you really want a good HTML editor and you're using KDE on any *nix variant, you might want to try Quanta. Plus, they're working on the next version that will make it a full WYSIWYG HTML editor. Some say it can compete Dreamweaver.

Actually a good thing

[GarfBond]

For those of you who aren't aware, Mozilla Composer's component owner, Daniel Glazman, has been employed by Lindows.com to continue work on Composer++ (a very good thing), which in turn will serve as the codebase for this new product, nvu. For those of you not believing that Lindows.com is serious about this (and I agree, this is easy to believe), let me remind you of the following:

• Lindows.com is *paying* a developer to continue working on a current OSS product, Mozilla, which in turn will add to their product
• nvu claims to be fully open source, which they seem to have every intention of following up on.
• Lindows.com is paying.

This is a case of lindows putting their money where their mouth is. They're contributing to open source, while also trying to differentiate themselves in the market. Let's give em a chance here.

Re:Actually a good thing

[Spoing]

This is a case of lindows putting their money where their mouth is. They're contributing to open source, while also trying to differentiate themselves in the market. Let's give em a chance here.

Agreed. They've contributed quite a bit in the past too. While I get sick thinking of running a system as root, they do the marketing that many uber geeks (myself included) find distasteful. There is a place for Lindows inc. in the broad diverse open source world -- and they are carving out that nitch.

Re:It doesnt look promising it looks EXACTLY like

[muzza]

Indeed the "Publish Settings" dialog shown in this image sitemanager.jpg still has the Mozilla icon on it.

Nice...

[BladeMelbourne]

If Nvu allows editing source code directly (not just WYSIWYG) it will be interesting to see how it compares to my other favourite editors:

Bluefish

Screem

Quanta

XHTML + CSS, my friend

[Peter Cooper]

But claiming that there is no need for good graphical HTML editors (Dreamweaver is the only one that currently really rates as good, BTW) is a nonsense.

That may have been the case a few years ago, but as anyone who claims to know anything about the field knows, you should be using XHTML and CSS now.

When you separate presentation from content, you can easily use a text editor for the content, and not lose any context.

What would be more useful, however, is a CSS previewer, but CSS is, mostly, consistent so producing the look you want isn't so difficult anyway.

Re:XHTML + CSS, my friend

[cnelzie]

Consistent if you are only developing for Internet Explorer or Netscape/Mozilla exclusively. Once you want your page to look good on both browsers you need to have a browser 'discovery' query that then points to a particular set of CSS files...

I haven't had the time to finish one up, but I have been on again and mostly off again developing a web-site and while it works and looks nice in Explorer, the text is cut-off in Netscape/Mozilla, I have no idea what it would look like under opera and I know that it won't work nicely in Lynx or Links, since it uses DHTML for some limited 'pop' with some menus...

Re:XHTML + CSS, my friend

[mlk]

(W3C tips to the rescuse)

Pop up menus can work well Lynx(etc) with:
<span class="hidden"><a href="menu-end">skip menu</a></span>

and/or the use of of
@tty {
dynamic-menu: { // hidden }
no-dynamic-menu: { // un hidden }
}
@screen {
dynamic-menu: { // unhidden }
no-dynamic-menu: { // hidden }
}

And blind readers are spared gibberish with @aural.

Re:Why?

[saden1]

Why is the parent moderated Troll? Parent post has valid points.

GoLive is by far the best tool out there. I can't fathom why Dreamweave still has a tight grip on market. Maybe all those UI guys just like to stick with what they know best? Time to update those skills and go with GoLive I say.

Re:lindows sucks ..

[IM6100]

Increasingly, there are a whole lot of new 'folks' along for the ride in OSS, as it becomes more and more accessable to regular folks.

There are quite a number of people hawking their 'customized' versions of OpenOffice (search for Luxuriousity Office') and The Gimp these days on eBay. If you're looking into the price that MS Office is selling for with common search terms, you're SPAMMED with those bid items.

MozillaZine Article

[Anonymous Coward]

MozillaZine has an article about Nvu with some tasty details.

Michael Robertson, CEO of Lindows.com, has announced that his company is starting a project to build an easy-to-use Web publishing product for Linux. The new application, called Nvu (pronounced 'N-view'), will be based on Mozilla Composer and released under the Mozilla Public License. Lindows.com has contracted Daniel Glazman of Disruptive Innovations to be the lead developer, though the company hopes to attract other contributors. Version 1.0 of Nvu is expected in the first quarter of 2004. See the Nvu FAQ for more information.

So, it's based on Mozilla Composer, the lead of developer of Composer will be on board and it's going to be released until the Mozilla Public License. Could it get any better?

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

Re:Looks iffy, actually (licensing)

[skiflyer]

What's wrong with this exactly? Mozilla had the choice to license their software as they saw fit. For whatever reason, they chose the MPL as one of those methods... now if someone adheres to the spirit and letter of the MPL license law, they're somehow meeting the bare minimum legal requirement and purposesly blocking cooperation? That's an odd argument to me... they're doing exactly what Mozilla licensed people to do with the code is more what it sounds like.

Re:Looks iffy, actually (licensing)

[aldoman]

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.

Re:Looks iffy, actually (licensing)

[rmohr02]

Isn't the MPL compatible with the GPL and LGPL? That would mean Lindows could release it under the MPL, but the Mozilla Foundation could re-release it under the MPL/GPL/LGPL.

Re:Who cares?

[lee7guy]

Yes, these apps are needed.

CSS or no CSS, it is still more effective designing pages. Write the code and see the effect of changes directly, without having to switch to browser and reload.

Would you use Emacs or Vi instead of Maya or Lightwave when modelling 3D graphics?

Annoucements

[matrix_alien]

I thought only Microsoft announced vaporware. Geez. Open-Source is becoming more like them all the time. Show us some working code, and then crow about it.

Re:Look, it's fairly simple:

[Anonymous Coward]

If you don't know HTML, then you don't deserve to have a website.

If you don't know how to do all your own repairs, you don't deserve to have a car.

If you can't install it yourself, you shouldn't have cable.

If you can't put it together yourself, you don't deserve to have a computer.

If you can't build it yourself, you don't deserve to have a house.

If you can't cook it yourself, you don't deserve a gourmet meal.

That's about how stupid that statement is. Not just this statement, but all the ones here where people say there's no need for any WYSIWYG editors or anything different than what any particular poster uses.

I'm constantly amazed that /.'ers are so intelligent, but so stupid when it comes to understanding that it takes all types of people to make a world. There are many times I've needed to research subjects and found useful information (which I cross checked with other sources, so I knew it was valid) on poorly designed sites by hobbists or authorities in a subject, but not expert web designers.

Honestly, by reading /. posts, one would think geeks really were stupid enough to believe that only they had any right to use computers or design web pages. If that were true, computers wouldn't be as popular, as easily available, and as inexpensive as they have become. Many of us who program or develop would NOT have the jobs we have and wouldn't be able to afford computers because they'd be only in the back rooms of the universities and large corporations that could afford them.

Maybe you are so f*cking brilliant you can design wonderful web pages without using WYSIWYG editors and that you can do everything you'd ever want in emacs. But there are many people who lead balanced lives that are very active and can't spend years at a computer being supergeek and doing nothing but programming obscure code in emacs. I think it's great that such people can put out good websites with WYSIWYG editors. The world is richer for their work.

I also have to add that often it's easy to recognize sites that were entirely coded in text editors. They look, well, geekish, without any sense of design.

But maybe that's because they were designed by someone who is so fluent in emacs, vi, and/or html that they can do everything in html without ever once seeing the design. As opposed to someone who has a sense of humanity and has done more with their life than spend it growing fat and greasy in front of a computer, coding and whacking off to porno pics of chicks they could never meet in real life because their great coding skills come at the expense of their poor social skills.

(Poor social skills as in not being smart enough to realize that while THEY may prefer text editors, that doesn't mean there isn't a good use for other types of editors -- and as in geeks that have to continually bash any new technology that makes it easier for people who have lives to do what geeks have spent sequestered in their basements learning to do.)

It'd be a shame for Composer to die of neglect.

[ScottSpeaks!]

The Mozilla/Netscape Composer module is a solid tool for non-techies to create and maintain web pages. If Nvu keeps that going, while the Mozilla crew focus instead on the browser and mail client, that's a Good Thing.

MOD PARENT UP!

[mgkimsal2]

Excellent insight!

More like Composer on Steroids

[Jedbro]

I think you have a mis conception of what Nvu is and will be. Yes, it is taken from Composer, but more recently it is taken from Glazman's Composer++.

This will definitally not be the old buggy mozilla composer that it used to be. Daniel Glazman has some hot stuff up his sleevs for Nvu (a.k.a. composer ++).

Not to mention, since AOL fired all the Moz Devs, Lindows is now forking out money to Daniel to get Nvu up and running.

Re:Oh boy. This is sad..

[pair-a-noyd]

It's not flamebait, it's true. Create a a SIMPLE html document with a few tables, a few pictures, a few simple forms and a few paragraphs of text inserted into the tables.

Then VIEW the raw html code.

It's un-fucking-readable people.
Make the same page in another editor, any other editor for that matter and view the raw html code.

You'll quickly see the difference. Then try to load and edit a html page created with frontpage into any other html editor of your choice and try to change some things around. You'll swear an oath that you'll beat the shit out of the next person you meet that utters the words "I use frontpage"..

One lone vote...

[MsGeek]

...for BBEdit. Because It Doesn't Suck. Someone needs to build a workalike for BBEdit that runs on Linux, because Bluefish, Quanta and Screem all are wannabe HomeSite clones. I mean, HomeSite is nice, but BBEdit just...rocks, y'know?

Re:One lone vote...

[dr00g911]

Actually, make that two. BBEdit is the greatest text editor I've ever used. It's been enough to get several coders & HTML jockeys I know to switch to the Mac.

Homesite's OK... but I'm spoiled on the Mac being able to switch between docs and apps without each app having its own background (dual monitors, anyone?).

BBEdit + Expose + a free mouse button = extra hours a week gained from not having to fight the interface or shuffle windows.

Re:One lone vote...

[adamfranco]

I must agree heartily with you. I use BBEdit all day every day developing web apps in PHP and it is the greatest thing ever. Some favorite bits:

- REALLY easy to use global find and replace (with regexs if desired).
- Diff viewing between files.
- Keystrokes set-able for things like
/*********
* Comments
*********/
- Keystrokes for indenting/denting the currently hightlighted text.

Basically, BBEdit just rocks and the menu structure is logical without lots of button-bars to swap in and out (like Bluefish). At home I use vi, but for heavy coding, BBEdit is king.

Re:One lone vote...

[repetty]

Me three. I keep trying other editors (Jedit, most recently) but I always keep coming back to BBEdit. Even old versions of BBEdit are great.

--Richard

Re:One lone vote...

[Kalak]

The day UNIX came to BBEdit I cried. If BBEdit were to ever come to Linux (or anything close), I'd probably not bother to touch a Mac again. As it is now, I use the latest version to even write my shell scripts for my Linux servers. It slices...It dices...Look at that tomato! Screw the hype, BBEdit just plain doesn't suck, and *all* editors compared to it do. Flame on vi and emacs users - you just like the torture.

Re:One lone vote...

[WWWWolf]

Phffff. Linux doesn't need a BBedit clone - there are too damn many editors already for *NIX.

Contrarily, MacOSX needs to ship with a copy of XEmacs (which is the One True Editor) that runs right away when the user gives even the slightest hint to edit text. (And for that matter, so does Windows =)

Re:One lone vote...

[lysium]

I'll second that. BBEdit has been my preferred editor for awhile now. It makes sense, if only because a Macintosh and web design go together like an iPod and.......well, a Macintosh.

=======

Re:It doesnt look promising it looks EXACTLY like

[Fragmented_Datagram]

The biggest thing missing from Mozilla Composer is the ability to create form elements... why, oh why, haven't they added this feature?

Re:Look, it's fairly simple:

[TheWanderingHermit]

How complex a website?

Maybe because I've got a full life and a lot more things to do with my time.

I can do straight HTML. But if I'm doing a big site, it is much more efficient to do it in WYSIWYG, get it done, and go on and have time with my friends.

But the point was not whether or not your nephew could do it (I'm assuming, since he is such a good example, that his sites include CSS and javascript controlled menus -- right?), but that there are many people who have good reasons for doing web sites but don't have time to learn HTML.

It seems to be the general geek opinion, though, that anything less than "what I use as a geek" is inferior and those using something else that is easier shouldn't be doing anything in computers.

Re:Exactly-Outsourcing the click.

[pyrrhonist]

The problem isn't that U.S. workers are unskilled, the problem is that they are more expensive than outsourcing.
How am I supposed to remain competitive with people who make less money than the poverty level in the U.S.?
I can't, no matter how skilled I am, because U.S. companies only care about the bottom line, not skills.

If you'd raise the standard of living in your fucking country, I might have a chance to compete.

Backward compability issues

[FrankoBoy]

A while ago, I've read somewhere ( don't remember the place, sorry ) that some old versions of some browsers had issues about ISO char tables. Moreover, I've seen many ISO web pages rendered weirdly on Macs ( random accents stuff ) and I just don't wanna see my web page wrecked like these, so I consider it more safe to use the original char table even while writing in French, and WYSIWYG editors allow me to do it quite alright.

Re:Backward compability issues

[boneshintai]

I've read somewhere ( don't remember the place, sorry ) that some old versions of some browsers had issues about ISO char tables.

That'd be Netscape 4.x, which you can and should ignore as much as possible. It doesn't even get &#(number) character references right unless the document is in UTF-8 in the first place, in which case you can mostly get away with using the original character.

One possible (and likely) source of character mangling is an incorrect Content-Type HTTP header. The <meta http-equiv="Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"> (or whatever character encoding you're using) hack works, most of the time, but you're almost always better off simply configuring your web server to send the right information in the first place.

I'd suggest nosing around groups.google in comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html -- there's a lot of useful information in the archives, and the people who post there have a fairly large amount of Clue.

Re:What we really need...Cheap secretaries.

[rsilvergun]

That's when you hire a CPA. That way, you pay him once to come along with you, not all year long.

And the problem with "ugly" is what, precisely???

[$ASANY]

If only we could mandate that anyone who writes a blog does so in emacs. The average intellectual quality of the web would fscking skyrocket.

Too little

[unoengborg]

This is a great improvement of free web authoring tools, but today most websites do not consist of static pages. This worries me as this tool doesn't seam to handle that.

To be a Frontpage/Dreamweaver killer it need to handle database driven websites in a simple fashion. It also need to handle serverside scripting like jsp/php.

Anyway it's a start.

Re:Too little

[16K Ram Pack]

I've been thinking that what would be really useful to users is a web based equivalent of MS Access meets FrontPage.

You can build straightforward pages, or you can build pages bound to datasources.

Any user wanting to update the database would just use a browser to do it.

Lot of work, though!

Re:Too little

[namekuseijin]

today most websites do not consist of static pages

need to handle serverside scripting like jsp/php

I don't know if you're a programmer, but dynamic, database-driven sites are created by having server-side scripting tools like jsp, php or asp customize static HTML docs like those produced by Composer or Dreamweaver, and then send the resulting web page to the client. So, you sure need static HTML docs, you can think of them as templates to the programming tools.

The webdesigner using the wysiwyg authoring tools should not deal with programming, scripting, databases or whatever.

Re:Too little

[Reziac]

If Corel could be dragged back onto the bandwagon, they're a thought too, since the WordPerfect suite (including the Paradox database) does do interactive web stuff.

Re:Too little

[leerpm]

I don't think they are going after that market. Even Microsoft's FrontPage and DreamWeaver are no longer targetted there. You are thinking of enterprise-level sites connecting to databases, etc. But there is still a huge market for static webpages, and most of them end up on the company's intranet.

Partnership

[AvengerXP]

50$ says this app only works on nVidia cards. Oh come on it's just a joke.

That's cool and all

[rsilvergun]

but can SQL-Ledger do payroll automatically (including factoring in tax tables)? If it can, wow. I'll shut up and be very, very happy :). From what I understand, Quickbooks can download the lastest tax information for your state and handle stuff like withholding and deductions for you automatically, without you having to have a detailed knowledge of tax law. To be fair, I don't know what I'm talking about here. I've perused the SQL-Ledger site a bit, and it definately has features to deal with taxes. I don't know enough to say how sophistocated they are.

Still, is SQL-Ledger as braindead simple as Quickbooks? Again, can I give it to a secretary and expect her to do my 100 employee or so's accounting reliably?

Re:Exactly-Outsourcing the click.

[Rajesh Gupta]

The problem is that whole industries - in America, here and elsewhere - are based on groundless dominative conventions, and proprietary software is a great example. Now, the difference is that since the U.S. is at a very evolved capitalist state, there are lots of such industries and as better and cheaper alternatives ( like Free Software in IT ) will keep coming, more and more industries will have difficulties in America.

And moreover, how dare you complain about my "fucking" country being poor as it is. Have any clue about American multinationals plundering our natural resources ( eg. tea and rice ) ? Our standard of living would be pretty high by now if your billionnaires stopped funneling profits done in our "fucking" country back to America and bribing our corrupt politicians to be able to continue doing it.

You're a victim of your national economics, deal with it. Hey, that's alright though, billions of people already are, though they have much more serious concerns than venting on /. ...

Re:And Guess What?

[antis0c]

At the risk of feeding trolls, you're mistaken, vi is a slim effeicent editor. Emacs is the correct operating, err.. editor you were referring to.

Hand Coding...

[LamerX]

Yeah well screw you VI and EMACS users, I do hand coding the REAL way. None of this weak-ass text editing stuff. If you want real layout you need to get as serious as me! Why the real hardcore people like me just build a cleanroom, then we take apart our hard drives and encode the binary ASCII codes onto the hard drives with little tiny maginets. It gives you such cleaner ASCII than what those crappy text editors can put out. Plus, I get to chose my text format from the get go, DOS, Mac, UNIX, whatever I want. Hell, I can even mix and match for the best compatability. Lets see your silly text editors do that!

Re:Hand Coding...

[mlk]

You use a hard disk, you wuss.

paper tape all the way baby!

Re:Hand Coding...

[Reziac]

Wow, and here I thought I was a geek for doing "copy con program.zip" :)

No CSS == no go

[foniksonik]

I looked and looked on each of the two pages ;-p even looked at the screenshot... didn't see CSS mentioned even one time.

The future is CSS and DOM, not to mention XForms, SVG and XML services. I'm not saying that this NVU will be amateur or a poor editor, just that it won't be a real contender for a long time.

Re:No CSS == no go

[glazou]

I joined the CSS Working Group at the beginning of 1997, and am the author of the quite popular CSS editor add-on for Composer called CaScadeS...

So, trust me, CSS is not forgotten.

Daniel Glazman

Whitespaces anyone?

[Grave_Rose]

It seems that someone likes the "

 

" code a lot over there... Or they just fell asleep and landed on ^V on the keyboard at the end of the document. :)

Gr@ve_Rose

What does Linux need?

[hampton2600]

As a part time web designer, in my experience HTML can be hand coded. But you know what can't be done by hand? Laying out the design of a site. Sure GIMP is good for image manipulation... but I'm pretty certain that there isn't a free version of something Fireworksesque out there. HTML is easy without a killer app. Design is hard without a killer app. If the linux community wants to have full out webdesigners (coders and graphics) join their ranks, then this is a MUST. Hell, IMHO... vi is a perfect HTML and PHP killer app. ------- Why does my head hurt? hampton2600.com

Will it spit out as ugly code as dreamweaver?

[Yaa 101]

In that case no thanks...

I stick with my Bluefish editor

Way more elegant (non bloat) design...

Re:Will it spit out as ugly code as dreamweaver?

[Trillan]

Gosh, what do you consider ugly code? I make all my pages in Dreamweaver, and I've never seen anything approaching ugly code from it.

I mean, I'll grant you if you use nested tables to try to get formatting effects it'll get ugly, and maybe if you keep re-applying styles... but this is a pretty common problem. A user who isn't aware of the medium they're using will always find some way to produce garbage results. If you know what you're doing, the produced code is very clean.

Everything I write in Dreamweaver validates. I always run it through HTML Tidy after, but that's just to pretty-print it.

Of course, I'm not using MX 2004 yet, just MX. It's possible they've screwed everything up...

Re:Will it spit out as ugly code as dreamweaver?

[Trillan]

It's a matter of taste I suppose. I prefer to type my content and apply formatting after. I'd rather type an apostrophe than , I prefer shift enter to
, I like being able to apply strong with a single keystroke. I like not having to check the size of gifs.

There are a number of nice things about Dreamweaver.

But if we were working together, I would happily agree to different tools as long as we were both validating and using the same pretty print settings.

Re:Will it spit out as ugly code as dreamweaver?

[Trillan]

Excuse the poor wrapping. Seems to be a Web Pro problem.

When will they release the Lindows DVD Player

[Bruha]

I never knew it but Lindows has a good DVD playback software program. I'll even pay for a downloadable version to run on SuSE! I've emailed them several times but they never respond.

Re:When will they release the Lindows DVD Player

[Zaiff Urgulbunger]

OT but anyway... these are my (very very brief) notes for getting DVD play back running on SuSE 8.2 Pro:

First install libdvdcss from a console using (whilst logged in as root!):

rpm -i libdvdcss-1.2.2-1.i386.rpm

Then using Konqueror or something similar, click on and install the following using YaST2:

* libxine1-1_rc0a-0.pm.0.i686.rpm
* libxine1-dvd-1_rc0a-0.pm.0.i686.rpm
* xine-ui-0.9.22-0.pm.0.i686.rpm

You can run xine-check as a normal user to test the installation/hardware. This will likely point out that the DVD is not using DMA which causes poor performance. To fix this, enter the following in to a console (I think you must be root):

hdparm -d1 /dev/hdc

At present I haven't figured out how/where to put this in the system boot sequence.

To start Xine, just open a console and type xine.

Obviously you'll have to find and download the above RPM's, but I don't think any of them are large or hard to find.

Best regards, Z.

In the same breath?

[lowe0]

Isn't there some sort of law against mentioning FrontPage and Dreamweaver in the same sentence? If not, there damn well should be.

Hell, I'm about as pro-MS as you can get on Slashdot, and even I think FrontPage is rancid. It's great for cranking out sites according to its template kits, but for anything heavier-duty than a personal page, it's time for Dreamweaver. Even Visual InterDev was better than FrontPage.

Site Editor?

[zandermander]

I think I've looked at Bluefish before.

There are several great editors out there and Bluefish certainly stands near the top but...

where is the site manager like you'd find in Dreamweaver or (shudder) Frontpage?

Sorry, I love Linux and all other FLOSS. I use OpenOffice.org wherever possible. I browse and do email with Mozilla... I advocate as much as possible but until there is a high quality web authoring tool which also has a site editor, the only way you'll get me to give up Dreamweaver is by prying it out of my cold dead hand.

But I have hope - the tide of Open Source is rising faster and faster! :-)

Re:Site Editor?

[Homburg]

Does anyone still do site management by hand? Every web site I'm involved with either uses, or is in the process of switching to, a content management system, whether that's Plone, PostNuke, or something as simple as Blogger.

FrontPage and Dreamweaver strike me as incurably stuck in the dark ages of the Web, providing solutions to problems nobody has anymore, those involved in writing and maintaining a large number of individual, static, pages. Web sites (at least, those I'm familiar with) don't work that way these days - they work both at a level of granularity below the page (individual news headlines, or articles, or other chunks of content) and above the page (topics and templates). With this kind of system, writing HTML is a fraction of the overall work of running the site, so WYSIWYG page editors like Frontpage are pretty useless. I suppose you could do a draft of your main page template in Frontpage before implementing it properly, I suppose, but I'm not sure that usage would be worth the money.

So, I think the OSS world already has an alternative to Frontpage and Dreamweaver. What it doesn't have (because it doesn't need) is a clone of either of those two doomed applications.

Re:Look, it's fairly simple:

[some guy I know]

If you don't know how to do all your own repairs, you don't deserve to have a car.

If you can't install it yourself, you shouldn't have cable.

If you can't put it together yourself, you don't deserve to have a computer.

If you can't build it yourself, you don't deserve to have a house.

If you can't cook it yourself, you don't deserve a gourmet meal.

[rant]

If you don't know how to do these things, you hire someone who does.
Similarly, if you don't know HTML, you hire someone who does.

Today's WYSIWYG editors are equivalent to an automatic mechanic, automatic cable installer, etc., in your examples, which are poor analogies.
I'm not saying that there is no place for WYSIWYG editors; it's just that you aren't going to get quality web pages with them.
To modify one of your examples, it's like "If you can't cook it yourself, pop a TV dinner in the microwave".
The current crop of WYSIWYG editors (that I've seen) are the TV dinners of the web world.

This is not to say that WYSIWYG editors are always going to be bad.
An editor that I might use would have at least three windows:

• Raw HTML/XHTML/XML with syntax highlighting, a vi/vim/gvim interface, and semi-automatic validation.
• CSS/XSL style sheet.
• The graphical output (or audio output for the visually impaired, etc.).

Other handy windows would be DTD/XSSL, plug-ins for an SVG graphic editor (plus source window), etc.

Small companies are

[rsilvergun]

obviously Dell and AOL/Time Warner need CPAs. Medium sized (100 or so employees) buisnesses don't. I know of several that are doing exactly what I'm talking about. Accounting is basically a repetitive task that's only difficult because of the sheer number of laws, rules and computations involved. Quickbooks automates all that, reducing acounting to data entry.

As for a secretary being terrified of Linux, what makes you think they're not terrified of Windows. I once had to fix a computer where they only thing wrong was the secretary clicking 'cancel' when I.E. asked them if they wanted to leave a secure web site (they're homepage was a secure site, they couldn't get to any other site because they'd click cancel every time the dialog popped up). Computers are just tools to most people. Very expensive tools they're afraid of breaking. Heck, if anything Linux could finally put a stop to this nonsensical fear:

Me: This is your new computer.
Secretary: It looks complicated...
Me: Don't worry, you can't break anything. It won't let you.

Once people get used to computers they can't break the fear will evaporate and they'll start reading dialog boxes instead of panicing and clicking 'cancel'.

Re:Small companies are

[back_pages]

You are so absolutely right that our current atmosphere around computers is just absurd.

Everyone who uses Linux is a geek while all the clueless people are using Windows. I'm being objective here, Windows has so many quirks and flaws that people learn to just live with that it's really a sad satire of how computer use really should be.

My graduate professor in usability engineering brings his Win2k laptop to class to show us powerpoint presentations. Neither he nor anyone in the class can figure out why plugging into the ethernet in the classroom means that html links from his PP to .jpg images prevents the links from working, though they work fine in his office, but if he leaves the ethernet unplugged in the classroom, everything works fine. Honestly, WTF? Even if someone here can reply with an explanation, WTF?

Installing and maintaining Linux is still very complicated compared to the alternatives, but for non-computer people who just want a tool that they cannot break and doesn't assault them with vague, bizarre dialogue boxes about illegal operations and so forth should be using Linux.

There is a lack of fully developed (or well publicized and popular) business applications for Linux, but there is just as great a problem among geeks who aren't very receptive to the idea of installing/maintaining stripped down Gnome/KDE installations for people who literally could not care less about computers. They do not want five different text editors and couldn't even care that they exist; they don't need a "Start menu" (or analogous name) with 59 sub-menus. They need an office computer that looks and functions more like an information kiosk or ATM, not the standard Windows installation that gives every soccer mom the ability to fark up the entire machine in 1700 different ways.

Re:Small companies are

[Bodrius]

- Medium sized companies may be doing just what you said. They may be getting themselves in trouble because of that... The cases I've seen it happen are cases I hope they don't get audited.
If you want to save yourself the CPA, by all means go ahead, but don't put that responsability on the hands of a 25K secretary with a typing-speed certificate.
Put that responsability on a decently-paid employee that has some accounting experience/knowledge, and is compensated enough to CARE.
It's not that accounting is a complex task. It's that it involves a lot of legal/financial responsability, and some common-sense criteria and ethics that should not be easy to invalidate (by say, the boss suggesting they classify personal expenses as company expenses).
At worst, put it in the hands of the owner of the company.

Accountants for small companies are like managers. They're well paid not because they have to be intelligent, educated or technically capable. They are well paid because their decisions have strategic consequences for the company, therefore they carry more responsabilities, and their mistakes are more costly (and should be made more costly to them as well).

- I never said the secretary was not terrified of Windows. READ MY COMMENT.
I said that a secretary is terrified of even a change in their screen saver settings. I'm being specific, because I've seen that, and more, happen. (The same applies to any generic non-techie office worker, as a matter of fact).
It follows that they will be terminally terrified by Linux. Why? I've seen it happen too.
It may be simpler and more secure once you restrict the environment, but it is also totally foreign to them. The environment is different. The applications are different. The expectations are different.
Fear precedes any interaction that may quell the fear by a long shot.
It's not just that they fear they'll "break something". They feel essentially lost. They fear after taking Office courses at the local community college their resume skills just flew through the window (no pun intended).
They don't like it, and it will cost you more than the Windows license before they get used to it.
I've seen them terrified by a Mac, for that matter.

Please go back and read my comment again. I'm not disagreeing that Linux needs Quickbooks. I'm not disagreeing that Linux has a place in the office.

I'm just saying the dream of firing your accountant and replacing that person with an underpaid secretary running a Quickbooks clone on Linux is a very, very, very stupid bad idea.

Since so many people got confused, I'll be specific:

Linux needs a Quickbooks clone because providing an alternative for the company accountant (CPA or not) removes one of the few remaining Big Reasons not to switch the whole company to Linux, which is where you can see the savings.

Re:Small companies are

[tonymus]

Medium sized businesses (100 or so employees) that don't utilize the services of CPAs get what they deserve, and you can buy their assets for 10 cents on a dollar when they go belly up.

First off, Quickbooks is a terrible program for most specialized industries (construction, for one). That, and its idiot half-brother, Turbo Tax, illustrate GIGO better than any computer book I've ever read.

Speaking of idiots, thank your Congress for mucking up the tax laws on an annual basis, which pretty much guarantees me and all the other CPAs full, permanent employment.

Thirdly, who's minding the store? An owner, partner, or President who worries about keeping books isn't doing what he's supposed to be doing, which is securing new business. That criminally stupid, in my view. Also, without someone reviewing the internal accounting controls on a regular basis, employees will tend to look like Iraqis right after the liberation of Baghdad, when everyone was liberating home electronics from the captivity of the electronics store.

I could go on, but I will leave with two thoughts:

1)a good CPA costs their company NOTHING (they'll save more than their cost), and

2) A good businessperson will hire a good CPA at $100 to $200 an hour, and go about earning $600 an hour or more securing new business.

Re:Small companies are

[_randy_64]

Me: This is your new computer.

Secretary: It looks complicated...

Me: Don't worry, you can't break anything. It won't let you.

Secretary: Ok, let me try this new Mandrake CD, it's supposed to be cool and easy to use. Let me just put it in this Dell.....

Me: Ooops.

Slight edit

[some guy I know]

That should say:

From what I've seen on the web, most WYSIWYG-created pages are the TV dinners of the web world.

Re:lindows sucks ..

[Anonymous Coward]

"M. Robertson and company are riding on the hype ... with no real product of their own"

I keep hearing that the one thing Microsoft does better than everyone else (especially open source) is marketing. So here comes a guy who wants to supply nothing but marketing for open source products, and everybody want to run him out of town on a rail because he doesn't do engineering.

I guess that passes for logic in geekville.

Lindows does Japan

[Neo-Rio-101]

http://www.geocities.com/cdsixfour/toberemoved/lin dows.jpg Type that into a new browser window if the link doesn't work. Come-on Lindows Octopus.... no hitting below the belt!

Mozilla Composer...

[illumina us]

I think they already have a HTML editor that rivals FP and DW for Linux that is 100% OSS. It's called Mozilla Composer, it's bundled with a browser.

Re:Mozilla Composer...

[KnightStalker]

Nvu *is* Mozilla Composer. See here.

Re:Mozilla Composer...

[mark-t]

Okay... Since when is Mozilla Composer is not just a web *PAGE* editor, but actually a web *SITE* editor?

There's a difference, man... pay attention.

Wysiwyg page editing is trivial... it's bunding that into a package that conveniently allows you to organize an entire web site that would make this software really desireable.

Re:Mozilla Composer...

[Queuetue]

I didn't see what you were indicating there, so here's the nvu faq, which states that it's a branch of moz composer, released under the mpl, with site-management and enhanced table/form support added.

Re:I believe that this works under wine...

[Dr_Marvin_Monroe]

I've just checked in the application database, and it looks like Quickbooks Pro can be made to work under wine.

Give me CAD software (like Solidworks 2003) and I'll throw my Windows away forever.

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.

Re:Text vs. WYSIWYG

[Arker]

But if this thing is a real Frontpage work-alike, it's going to spit out horrid broken code almost as bad as Word anyway, that's the biggest worry I would have.

I do simply html in notepad/textedit whatever, and use Emacs with html and php syntax highlighting when I need more, so the holy war aside we basically agree on that, and although I think Emacs is infinitely more newbie friendly than VI, it's still obviously not something I could expect my mom to sit down and start coding pages in. So yes, something like this could be good. But every implementation of this idea I've seen yet spits out horrible broken code and there are reasons for that, so I'm a bit skeptical too.

Re:Text vs. WYSIWYG

[efti]

But if this thing is a real Frontpage work-alike, it's going to spit out horrid broken code almost as bad as Word anyway, that's the biggest worry I would have.

Since this is the offshot of the Mozilla Composer, it won't be quite as bad as Frontpage. I don't think that by 'workalike' they mean 'we'll duplicate the bugs and the brain-damage'...

But every implementation of this idea I've seen yet spits out horrible broken code and there are reasons for that, so I'm a bit skeptical too.

Ouch, I'm a web standards geek and you've touched a major sore spot of mine. So I guess I have no choice but to have a rant ;-)

Apologies if you already know this and / or if I get something wrong. I'm writing this so someone would correct me if I'm wrong...

<rant>

You have every reason to be skeptical. Even Mozilla Composer spits out tag soup. It's valid tag soup, but it's still lacks any kind of semantics and structure. And that's because it is utterly impossible to produce a semantically correct HTML document with a word processor, especially for people who only know word processors. On a side note, tag soup syndrome also explains why those MS Word documents so incredibly bloated.

I had the misfortune to be required to learn WordPerfect for DOS, which was still an non-WYSIWYG word processor. And guess what. If you wanted to make text bold, you had to insert a special 'bold' code (using some key combination I can't remember) and then at the end of the bold text, enter an 'end bold' code, similarly to using <b> in HTML.

When WYSIWYG editors came along, they automated this process. You'd select some text, click on the 'bold' button and the word processor inserts the begin and end markers for you at the beginning and the end of the selection. As you continue to edit the document, there would be more and more markers scattered all over the document, but you don't know that since you cannot see the source. So your document is tag soup and you don't know it.

Then as word processors evolved, they kept adding more and more formatting options, all of which had to be stored with the text. Even the default settings were saved because the default could be set different on another computer. To make things worse, MS Word and WordPerfect were constantly trying to crack each other's document format while simultaneously make it as hard as possible to read their format. The result is a massive, bloated mess. When you save HTML from MS Word, this bloated mess and the associated philosophy gets converted to a bastardised version of MS-HTML, which adds extra features to accomodate formatting that doesn't at all belong into a web document, laced with conditional comments and other 'innovations'.

Frontpage and Dreamweaver both started out as simple word processors that produce HTML markup. This was OK, because most people were familiar with word processors and because valid and semantically correct HTML wasn't even considered by anyone. Web developers at the time thought that they could write anything in any order as long as it looked right, and so the WYSIWYG editors could get away with doing the same.

Even Mozilla Composer works like a dumb word processor, which just doesn't cut it any more, especially not for a Mozilla component. Let's see an example. I start a new document and get a HTML document shell with an incorrect doctype declaration and a badly indented head and body.

Each time I press enter, a <br> is added. Each time I select some text and apply some formatting, a new <div> or <span> gets added with a style attribute. This is bad because it makes it almost impossible to produce semantically correct markup even if you know HTML and CSS. And a million style attributes are no better than a million <font> tags.

What would a decent editor look like then? For starters, it could remove

Re:Text vs. WYSIWYG

[Arker]

I had the misfortune to be required to learn WordPerfect for DOS, which was still an non-WYSIWYG word processor. And guess what. If you wanted to make text bold, you had to insert a special 'bold' code (using some key combination I can't remember) and then at the end of the bold text, enter an 'end bold' code, similarly to using <b> in HTML.

I used WP from version 4 through 6, and that's not how I remember it. You just selected the text and then selected bold if memory serves, like most word processors. Of course the tag soup you're talking about was hiding back there, and even in this situation where you don't have to worry about another program trying to parse the thing this is bad - it can cause all sorts of strange little problems, like for instance if you delete the text but not the spaces around it, and the spaces were inside the bold tags, then later you put your cursor in those spaces and start typing - wtf is that bold?!?!? The beautiful thing with WP though, unlike Word, was you could 'reveal codes' and figure these things out.

I preferred at the time to do my text in a real editor, then mark it up when it was ready and print it out with Ventura - but some things we did had to be electronically submitted in WP or Word, and WP was always a hell of a lot better than Word.

Anyway, although I disagree that "valid and semantically correct HTML wasn't even considered by anyone" - there are far too many self-described web designers that fit that bill, and were even in the early days, although it's my impression that's gotten worse, not better. Other than that, I agree with pretty much all you said. I think you're exactly right on the mechanics that cause the tag soup, and the mechanics of how a decent WYSIWYG editor could go about cleaning it up.

Re:Text vs. WYSIWYG

[efti]

I used WP from version 4 through 6, and that's not how I remember it. You just selected the text and then selected bold if memory serves, like most word processors. Of course the tag soup you're talking about was hiding back there, and even in this situation where you don't have to worry about another program trying to parse the thing this is bad - it can cause all sorts of strange little problems, like for instance if you delete the text but not the spaces around it, and the spaces were inside the bold tags, then later you put your cursor in those spaces and start typing - wtf is that bold?!?!? The beautiful thing with WP though, unlike Word, was you could 'reveal codes' and figure these things out.

Hmm, maybe we had 'reveal codes' turned on by default... It was 1996 and I was a just a student / newbie so my memory is somewhat hazy. In any case I remember seeing the codes and how you had to turn bold on and off (even if turning them on and off was probably done using Ctrl+B). And later it helped me make sense of the bizarre behaviour that you describe above.

It's too bad noone else will read this discussion now that the story's off the front page . It could have influenced someone, but now it's just another rant in the sea of rants that make up Slashdot :-/

Re:Text vs. WYSIWYG

[Arker]

Hmm, maybe we had 'reveal codes' turned on by default...

Very likely the case. I remember for a little while I was the only person that did that, then our secretary asked me about that wierd window at the bottom of my screen, and I explained it and showed how I kept it open so I knew exactly what I was selecting, where I put attributes and the like... a couple weeks later I noticed that everyone in the office had switched it on.

Re:Way OT: Re:What we really need... is more stuff

[ducomputergeek]

SQL-Ledger works great. I now offically am the "General Manager" of a small graphics and specialized consultancy firm. (Basically means that I run the business and its 6 employees and meet with clients. I don't do much of the grunt work, which I enjoyed).

It was hard to win over our investors, who wanted us to use Quickbooks, but eventually it came down to the, "if your going to put me in charge, let me run the damn thing". Somehow, despite my arrogance, we got our $600 white box with OpenBSD set-up in the office and the secatary/bookkeeper inputs invoices on her iMac with Safari without any complaints. (yes, our shop is 100% *BSD between Free, Open, and OS X)

Re:why?

[efti]

Good point! I always wanted an editor or IDE that supports the Vim key bindings. In fact, the lack of them turned me off Bluefish, Quanta and Anjuta even though all three are really nice editors / IDEs.

Of course an editor that supports the Vim shortcuts could still have a WYSIWIG interface and implement the usual Windows / Gnome / KDE shortcuts like Ctrl+C, Ctrl+Z, etc. Wouldn't it be nice? I think the main reason why such editor doesn't exist is because the Vim users rather stick to Vim than implement something like that for another IDE.

Re:It doesnt look promising it looks EXACTLY like

[Wolfrider]

--Way back in the day (like '96 or '97) I tried using Netscape composer, but stopped pretty much immediately because it screwed up the source HTML code so bad.

Re:that XML Bullshit

[AlphaSys]

[Word97] doesn't do the XML bullshit that the Office 2000 Word spews out.

Just FYI, that bullshit is their attempt at getting closer to the coming standard (actually it's already here for those who care to limp out of the last millenium). Not to over-congratulate them, they have sacrificed alot of the clean logic by extending Word formatting into their schema, but XHTML is where it's at, and if you don't dig that, either don't develop web pages in any framework or else make plain text your web server's only mime-type.

XHTML realizes to the fullest extent yet the power of CSS, and is slowly forcing a new level of standards compliance on what was before (and still is to a great degree) a very fractured browser base.

Then again, I'm not surprised that someone who prefers Office97 to Office 2000, XP or 2003 (or oOo for that matter) has no use for XML structure in daily tasks.

If XML is so worthless in presentation documents, why is just about every layout app (not just BS formatting toys like Word) including Illustrator, ImageReady, Acrobat, Freehand, Fireworks, Flash etc. (Quark is notably lagging, as usual) moving to XML for the internal structure that organizes the document content? Is it just a bandwagon that everybody is on because their collective arch-rival MS hyped it and "bet the farm" (ummm... yeah... that'd be great) on it? IDFTS!

Right, which is why...

[Infonaut]

every office in town runs Macintosh. ;-)

QuickBooks for Mac is popular, but it is hardly running in every office in town, although in many respects OS X is a superior OS for small business users.

Unfortunately the Lemming Factor is extraordiarily strong. It's the dark side of the infamous network effect. Everyone jumps off the same Windows cliff, even when a nice foot path with hand rails is available.

QuickBooks for Linux would be great. But it alone would hardly convert the masses in droves.

Re: FrontPage

[King_TJ]

Speaking as someone who never really learned a lot of HTML, yet who has built quite a few web sites using WYSIWYG tools (plus some editing of the generated code to clean it up or fix little things, a bit of "cut and paste" javascript, and so on) -- I have to say I always *liked* FrontPage.

Granted, the extensions are a big problem - but I think mostly because of their poor implementation, as opposed to in concept. (It seems to me that "WebDav" is trying to be a standardized version of the same basic idea, these days.)

The biggest reason I think FrontPage is so widely disliked is the tendency for people to use the built-in "themes", which were generally rather gaudy, and always immediately obvious when they're used. (By contrast, Adobe GoLive comes with 5 or 6 sample sites that people often build new pages from as templates, but they're more "professional" looking and tasteful - so the results are better.)

IMHO, there's really no reason, nowdays, why it shouldn't be pretty much "point and click" to add such common elements as a response form to email or even online checkout via PayPal, and even features like text inside graphical buttons should be generated "on the fly", if needed.

It amazes me that even today, some people have 4 or 5 programs they go between to get a basic site put together - and they *still* usually have to tie it all together with some handwritten HTML in a text editor. (Perhaps even more amazing, some of these same people will tell you it's somehow better and more efficient than having all of these features rolled up into a user-friendly tool. Go figure....)

it hurts so...

[Gribflex]

"... like FrontPage and Dreamweaver..."

It pains me that those two applications were compared; just like a ferrari and a one wheeled skateboard.

Re:Who cares?

[Canadian_Daemon]

using web-aware editors
I dont know if there is something similar in linux, but Hotdog is a great web aware html editer with a built in browser, you can see what your doing, and code with menus and helps

Re:why?

[efti]

I think Frodo meant 'WYSIWYG aside'.

But you are right, there are things that are quicker in an editor that writes HTML for you (or at least does code hinting), especially if you don't know HTML inside out. And there is certainly a bigger market out there for WYSIWIG editors than there is for Vim ;-)

Websphere from IBM nowhere to be found?

[burbs]

IBM released Websphere Homepage Builder for Linux a couple years ago, and that was pretty nifty for what it was. I just checked, and it looks like they didn't upgrade their Linux port of the program to the current version. It's not free, but I liked it tons better than Frontpage.

HUGE

[POds]

Thats a huge annoucement! This could severly hurt Macromedia. Either people have been right, OSS is going to take away jobs or it'll force companies such as Macromedia to continue enhancing their products with not seen before features... theres a word for it, just cant think of it atm :)...

I used this at my last possition ALOT. We did have licences for it and before i left/was made redundant we were looking at OSS for many of our tools, such as OpenOffice (OO) to replace word. Theres no doubt that this Nvu will be one of the great open source apps, up there with OO, linux, Mozilla etc!

And that word i was looking for is "Inovate". Macromedia are going to have to continualy inovate and enahnce their product by thinking of new ideas, or support new technologies like XML and XSL to get people to keep buying their stuff..

I guess this means im not going to have look for Dreamsweaver craks (which can be annoying) from now on!

OSS protects commercial vendors from illegal copies of their software!

Wow

[Tuross]

This is kinda like Zope except you can't do anything useful with it, like actually serve the generated site. Though I guess at some high level it could serve as an alternative user interface.

Ah well, the more software the merrier.

Re:Wow

[Queuetue]

Zope is a wysiwyg html editor? I think that you don't understand zope, you don't understand Nvu, or I don't understand you.

Re:Wow

[Tuross]

I'll bet on the last two ;)

From what I read on the Nvu site, it's not just a HTML editor, but something that will perform content management across an entire site. Now maybe I'm reading too much into that marketing blurb, but it sounds like its trying to compete (albeit in a small way) with Zope.

Re:Who cares?

[trg83]

True, Hotdog is nice. On Linux I have used Quanta. I have also used the HTML mode in emacs. That combined with the trusty alt-tab key combination (mileage may vary on non-GNOME/KDE systems) and a Mozilla browser is nice. I have been quite impressed with how the recent releases of Mozilla render HTML, Javascript, CSS, etc.

Easier Said Than Done

[ObsceneProphet]

The fundamental solution is compounded by the complexity of the problem.

Nice, but ...

[mark-t]

What about MathML and other XML?

Re:Look, it's fairly simple:

[TheWanderingHermit]

For the most part, I agree.

On the other hand, how are you defining a "bad" web page? I've seen some that may have bad code, but still get the information across. True, it's a TV dinner instead of a gourmet meal, but there is a place for TV dinners.

For example, if I have a friend over so we can work on a project for work, I might pop in a few TV dinners so we can eat while we work. If I have a date over -- well, it's not exactly time for a re-heated meal in a tray.

If you're a professional web designer, then use the best tool for you, which may be a text editor or Dreamweaver. On the other hand, if you like doing historical re-enactments, and know a lot about that, and want to share your resources with others in that field, or who are interested in that field, then a "tv-dinner website" is probably perfect. A WYSIWYG editor is great for someone like that -- they can put up a web page and share their knowledge. It may not be the best web page, but the point wasn't to produce excellent HTML and Javascript, but to share knowledge about re-enactments.

Just like having a friend over to get work done is not a task focused on food, so a tv dinner might fit the situation perfectly.

Re: FrontPage

[hamster foo]

Frontpage is great for what it is, which is a dumbed down web development tool. That's not meant to call someone dumb for using it, but it is what it is. It allows novices to easily create (generally bad) web content. I won't argue that doing it the handwritten way is more efficient, but it usually is better if you actually look at the content produced. Most WYSIWYG editors add a lot of uncessary tags into what they produce which just results in larger pages which isn't a desireable effect for a web page. That's something you generally don't see with pages handwritten by somebody that has a clue.

I'm all for user-friendly tools, but generally, people have their reasons for not using the ones that are available.

Re: Appgen MyBooks

[mhesseltine]

For those with short term memories, there was just recently a discussion about Appgen and their business stability. Just a consideration.

Also, if you are a small to mid-sized business, do you need an on-staff accountant? Couldn't you handle things in the office, and get monthly/quarterly/yearly reports from an accounting firm as you need them?

You say that it's a bad thing

[ironygranny]

I thought the whole point of OSS was for people to build upon the work of others for the betterment of the community. If a company wants brownie points for marketing this neato stuff to the rest of the world, more power to them, provided they give back to the community (which, as Nvu is MPL, it looks like they will?).

But, I mean, would it hurt them to call it something like "Web page designer program," or some other *descriptive* name? What the hell is a "Nvu?" Oh, wait. Never mind. Though I guess "Dreamweaver" doesn't describe exactly what the product does, it's at least catchy and it's easy enough to guess that it's some kind of artsy-fartsy thing.

Ah well, I've been eating halloween candy for the last hour or so, excuse me if I'm not exactly lucid.

Re:Who cares?

[SteamedPenguin]

Ahem.

These application are only more effective if you care whether you output HTML at all.

If you don't care and just want pretty pictures and some text, sure. Remember, HTML is only HTML if it validates. Without validation it is not HTML and you could be using anythig you want.

Also, it is markup, not code. Just because Dreamweaver calls it code view doesn't give you license to be dense.

It all depends, at some point we could be using SVG, or an extension of SVG to model 3D graphics. Then by all means use vi. personally I think it is easier to change

<shape color="#ff000" type="square" />

to

<shape color="#000000" type="cube" />

for example than to click three buttons. I can always preview using a image viewer and/or browser.

Besides, comparing HTML to 3D graphics is a big stretch. I'll leave it at that.

Re:It doesnt look promising it looks EXACTLY like

[Maso]

What about the children, you insencative clod?

Re:that XML Bullshit

[IM6100]

Umm, I was commenting about the way the parent (granparent) entered the big mess of HTML markup for the one-line HTML page.

XML is 'worthless' for simple exposition and communications, because the written word is being presented, not a 'layout.'

And, gee. I never thought I'd get flamed on Slashdot for not liking Office 2000.

I must have fallen off the bandwagon or something.

Rubbish

[Chuck Chunder]

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

"The user"?. The code is available under those three licences. Anybody can take the code and choose one of those licences to distribute under if they want.

There is nothing iffy about that. It is exactly what the tri-licence was set up for in the first place.

This sounds promising

[greenskyx]

Kudos to the Lindows people on starting this project. They seem to bring a certain polish to OSS project which makes them easy for the masses to use. I think this will turn out well for them.

I hope that more companies follow the example that Apple (and others I'm sure) set when they helped create a commercial project (Safari) and improve a OSS project (KTHML) all at the same time...

I can't wait to try Nvu out!

exit-recursive-edit?

[merriam]

ctrl-meta-c

No recursive edit is in progress. Never mind. Here's a command for people like you.

(shell-command "kedit" nil)

Re:Hmm

[00420]

But I can already run DW MX with Crossover!!!

Great. Can you get DW free (legally)? Can you get the source code?

Re:Exactly-Outsourcing the click.

[Sivaram_Velauthapill]

If you can't get a clue on how the world doesn't have to spin around the US' little finger anymore, you deserve to get your jobs outsourced.

What's to stop jobs that are going to India from being outsourced to another country, in oh 10 years? As the poster below points out, the #1 reason for outsourcing is the cost. If the cost of living in India were the same as USA, India would be equal (and hence few would outsource there).

You will never build up your country--or any other country for that matter--with capitalism. Capitalists only worship one thing: money. They don't even care about their country. These captitalists that help you now will also be your enemy. The day will come when they will happily move on to another country where wages are even lower (and the population can carry out the jobs). Capitalists will hold a gun to your head and you will be a slave to it. This gun will be none other than capital.

BTW, no one deserves to get jobs outsourced... I know capitalists like you don't care but you are so wrong.

Sivaram Velauthapillai

What about XML?

[Trejkaz]

I don't care about HTML... give me a good XML authoring tool for Linux that doesn't involve OpenOffice with stylesheets.

Yeah, but where's the beef?

[Fished]

If this product isn't vapor, where's the source? There's no reason they couldn't put up source or a developer preview.

Re:Yeah, but where's the beef?

[BZ]

Developer previews are at http://webperso.easyconnect.fr/danielglazman/compo ser/composer++.html if you care....

Re:It doesnt look promising it looks EXACTLY like

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds exactly like FrontPage to me....

Re:that XML Bullshit

[AlphaSys]

written word is being presented, not a 'layout.'

But that's just it. If you want accesible documents that can flex with whatever presentation layout the reader needs, XML/CSS is invaluable. And if you don't care about those things and are only interested in putting your verbage "out there", it's analogous to talking just to hear the sound of your own voice. Or would you prefer to (a) code separate pages for visually-imapired, etc. or (b) ignore them?

Your swipe was at XML integration into document formats as a whole and web documents in particular (or at least it seemed that way to me) as relates to presentation, or were we talking about something else?

Re:And Guess What?

[mlk]

Most people, when talking about vi, actually run VIM.

which is not that far off Emacs in its goal to become a complete OS in an editor.

Re:that XML Bullshit

[AlphaSys]

You're not far off base there, but even with the small subset of CSS2+ that is supported, you can do much more with less code than the diverging DHTML methodologies so rampant before XHTML started getting some uptake. The positive thing is that you can build some very, very sharp looking stuff for the truly compliant browsers and still have it look OK in IE. Before that was possible, the tendency of a large number of designers was to code for buggy-as-hell but market dominating IE and let compliant browsers degrade, and that ends up looking like shit in the better browsers. At least this way, designers can shoot for the standard and let IE take the rap for being sub-par.

But yeah, I'm with you... wouldn't it be great if the overwhelmingly predominant browser out there conformed to the standards that much less funded efforts have little problem adhereing to pretty well? I can't believe there is a technological barrier to IE conforming. It has to be purely out of spite.

Re:that XML Bullshit

[IM6100]

My 'swipe' was at Microsoft Internet Explorer, and Microsoft Word taking in a clean 'hand editable' HTML document that can be easily edited (i.e. to clip out the text content from a web page cleanly) and outputting an XML monstrosity that buries the text content in layers of dreck.

You can take a simple HTML page that someone edited using vi or what-not, read it with IE, and 'save' it to a hell of a mess.

As far as the comment about 'code for the visually-impaired'... ummm, if I produce a 'page' of HTML that is readable with lynx, I've not done (b) ignored them. Thanks for the accusation of political incorrectness, however.

I don't rightly know what we are talking about.

I know it has nothing to do with 'hearing the sound of my own voice.' Wherever the hell that came from...

Re:It doesnt look promising it looks EXACTLY like

[glazou]

You should take a closer look at the toolbar on screenshot available at http://nvu.com/screenshots.html

Daniel Glazman

Re:Who cares?

[j-pimp]

As a wanna-be sysadmin that prefers vim in almost all situations, I have to say to each their own, and use the right tool for the right job.

I code VB in vim. I also code in other real languages, and do much work on real OSes before you flame me. Anyway, point is I could probally edit the frm files and use gmake to compile programs all via command line, but I don't. I edit the code modules in vim and use the gui builder to make the forms. It gets the job done faster. I know that the frms are a plain text file and that if I have to do some massive global edit on 100 of them I have sed their as an option for doing it. However, if I want to draw a quick and dirty window to demonstrate my SQL middleware function I'm gonna use the GUI builder. Now I use vim for my html editing because I only make ugly simple html pages and keep them simple enough where I can just use a css to make them pretty. If I did html for a living or cared about presentation, I would learn something like dreamweaver and do it right.

Re:Look, it's fairly simple:

[Trolling4Dollars]

This is about the best post I've read all this year. While, I can "geek" with the best of them, I get fed up with the people out there who give us a bad name by claiming that people should learn to do everything for themselves. You know what I mean... that STUPID "self responsibility" kick a lot of people are on. It just isn't practical. For example, I HATE dealing with money. I'd reather leave it up to my bank to take care of that stuff for me. If it was up to me, my finances would be a wreck and I'd be in a bad mood 100% of the time (money just pisses me off in general). So bravo to this AC! I hope more people get the message.

Good Idea

[ONU CS Geek]

I think that this is a good idea; I know that there is some software that provides a decent IDE for HTML in KDE, however, the software is rather limited to HTML only.

I think what the open source community needs is a general, all around, Development Enviornment where you can edit files in a raw mode, swap over to a WYSIWYG editor, then let them preview using the browser of their choice--for not just HTML, but for PHP, Perl, and SQL as well...something that would be integrated into the server, as well as the development client.

Just my thoughts...but, still, I'm looking forward to it :)

Re:Exactly-Outsourcing the click.

[Rajesh Gupta]

You really didn't read what I replied to the other guy's post, right ?

Lack of understanding of apps like Dreamweaver

[bushboy]

It seems a lot of the 'purist' /. crowd always lean toward 'just use emacs or vi' to create HTML pages.

Obviously they have never maintained 30+ websites before :)

I guess it's the same /. crowd who feel that shockwave flash is a waste of time. They never seem to understand that it's not just code-jockeys who are serious computer nerds - the graphics nerds can be even more purist !

Wysiwyg HTML editors are a god-send to web developers, being one of the most time saving tools, which in turn saves money.

Certainly, a knowledge of coding raw HTML is a must for any web developer worth thier salt and Dreamweaver users often swich back and forward between code view and wysiwyg.

I hope the Nvu initiative does some great things - another quality HTML editor is always welcome.

Re:Lack of understanding of apps like Dreamweaver

[Reziac]

Right on.. as to myself, I like "purist" results (that is, clean code in the end) but I'll use whatever tool gets me there with the least work and hassle. Which is why I *don't* do most of my HTML in a text editor -- counting table tags is for the birds! :)

Envy?

[DerPflanz]

Nvu (pronounced N-view, for a "new view")

New view? Sure it is not announced as "Envy You"? Those Lindows guys just envy the people that can afford a real program like FrontPage.

Envy you?

[Kopretinka]

Envy you? Why?

Re:Mnyeh

[SlightOverdose]

If you have a group of people editing content, you need a CMS (Content Management System) such as Plone or Community Enabler. It makes life so much simpler.

(have a look at www.plone.org and www.communitye.net)

Takes Rubbish to know Rubbish

[ciaran_o_riordan]

For the mozilla folk to accept code into their tree, it has to use the standard mozilla tri-license.

Lindows could release their enhancements under the tri-license, but instead they have decided to only release them under the MPL, therefore blocking the mozilla crew from benefitting from the Lindows enhancements.

Yes, it's all legal. But it's a sub-optimal contribution from Lindows.com, when an optimal contribution would cost them zero extra.

Ciaran O'Riordan

Re:Takes Rubbish to know Rubbish

[Quarters]

Yes, it's all legal. But it's a sub-optimal contribution from Lindows.com, when an optimal contribution would cost them zero extra.

Unless, of course, the plan for Lindows is to (gasp) actually make money off of their effort. Giving the code back to Mozilla so free versions of nVu can become available would cost them a lot at that point.

The fact is that the Mozilla code was put out under a specific license (or licenses, as the case may be) and Lindows is adhering to that. Just because you don't like the lack of altuism in their decision it is still within the bounds of the license and legal.

Re: FrontPage

[Afrosheen]

the tendency for people to use the built-in "themes", which were generally rather gaudy, and always immediately obvious when they're used

Two words: Comic Sans.

Re:It doesnt look promising it looks EXACTLY like

[asciono]

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

Re: FrontPage

[16K Ram Pack]

When you say "generally bad" do you mean in terms of HTML efficiency, presentation or both.

I did something for someone in FP (as they had to add content to it later) with a little PHP and it looks OK (it was a job for a friend, and not my normal line of work). If I'd have done it in HTML and PHP, it would have looked better, but they'd have turned it into an awful mess in no time.

As for a bit more HTML overhead, sure, it's not good, but a few hundred bytes or ever a couple of K on a website doesn't make that much difference. Not justifying it, just saying it ain't that important.

Why not give screem a try?

[Hunter555]

For anyone that wants something that's similar to this but does not use the messy WYSIWYG display, try screem:

http://www.screem.org

I've been using it for a while and it's good/open source.
I especially like the inline tagging (If you type <body then a popup with all the options for a body tag appear and if you type </ then it automatically fills out the rest of the end tag.)

Re:Look, it's fairly simple:

[glazou]

> If you don't know how to do these things, you hire someone who does.

This assertion is just ridiculous.

Tell that to Mr Smith who just wants to set up a page with directions to his house, pictures of his gran'children and a few links to things he likes. And Mr Smith wants that page(s) to be sexy a bit, because it's his right to ask for that.

Tell that to a secretary when her/his boss has asked her to put online some information about the next corporate meeting.

Read me well : the problem is not users' side who are so stupid they can't make a site like the 8 years old other's nephew, the problem is on OUR SIDE, software engineers stupid enough we are unable to make a good web editing environment for normal people.

Wrt an HTML editing product, /.ers are just aliens.

Netscape?

[Lispy]

Isnt this basically what Netscape did too?

Re:Netscape?

[rmohr02]

No. Netscape added proprietary features such as AOL Instant Messanger to Netscape.

Re:Netscape?

[mlefevre]

And that's why the answer is "Yes".

When Netscape made changes to the Mozilla code, they contributed those changes back to Mozilla, which the MPL requires. However, they didn't release the code for the AIM built into Netscape.

Sounds like Lindows/NVU will do the same - changes made to the Mozilla Composer code will be contributed back into Mozilla, but new code written for other parts of the product won't be.

Re:Netscape?

[rmohr02]

The MPL doesn't require derivative works to be contributed back to Mozilla.

We need that NOW...

[cesarcardoso]

I'm working on a real big Windows to Linux migration and our biggest headache is Dreamweaver.

Hoping BADLY that Nvu fulfills the promise. :)

Re:We need that NOW...

[WebMasterJoe]

Your wait may be over, if you're willing to go the WINE route:
Dreamweaver MX, Flash MX With CrossOver Office
I haven't tried it myself yet, and I'd need Fireworks too, but it looks promising.

Re:We need that NOW...

[cesarcardoso]

Our problem is that we want to get rid of Macromedia :)

Re: FrontPage

[hamster foo]

Efficiency in terms of speed of production it is fine in. Presentation is what I was referring to with that comment. It wasn't meant to be as sweeping as it may have sounded. I'm not saying nothing good can come from Frontpage, but Frontpage attracts a lot of first time web page creators or people who are just looking to churn out a quick page for something, and the majority of those pages tend to be pretty bad from a presentation stand point for obvious reasons. You don't have as many novices or quick fix types messing around with tools like Dreamweaver although it happens.

As for the extraneous markup (and recent versions of FP may have improved upon this), you are right in most cases it won't make a difference, I just don't really like having extraneous information in HTML if I'm going to bother writing it, and every little bit helps if you're dealing with dial-up customers.

Re:It doesnt look promising it looks EXACTLY like

[Pedersen]

Hey, would you mind dropping me an email? Right now, I need something like Nvu, and would be willing to donate some time to make it happen (if this project can accept community involvement, you've got some right here). My email is m dot pedersen at icelus dot org.

Re: FrontPage

[Pedersen]

Sorry, but I have to throw my two cents in here. I've been helping my Dad work out a web site for the union he's in (I love him to death, but damn... how hard is it to make a freaking tag?), and there was one major issue before I did some work.

Previous maintainer had uploaded a copy of the union contract over three separateHTML pages, each of them 1.25 megs (thank you ever so much, MS Word!). I went in, and hand made the HTML page to contain the exact same information, but with a helluva lot less tags. The whole contract was a measly 103K (as opposed to 3.75M).

An extra K or two? Sure, go for it! What happens when it's generating an extra 3.61M of tags? For people on dial-up, that pretty badly sucks, I think.

Hint to Michael...

[miketang16]

When creating a new web design app, the phrase "like Frontpage" should never be used.

FrontPage != FrontPage Extensions

[stereoroid]

The FrontPage Extensions are not to be confused with FrontPage, the site editor that Nvu is aimed at replacing. If you use FrontPage to create a site, you don't have to use a server that has the FrontPage Extensions installed. You can use FTP to manage the actual upload to the site, within FrontPage, or outside using any FTP mirror program.

What I don't like about FrontPage is all the extra information it keeps in a "web", specifically all the "_" root folders. Maybe they are indices or support for link-tracking, but they add bulk to the local copy of a web site, even though they are not transferred to the live web server when publishing.

So, when I say I'd like a FrontPage-type tool for Linux, I don't mean that I want to use FrontPage extensions on a server. I mean:

• Management of a site, not just a single page;
• If you move or rename a page, it should check for and modify links to that page;
• Checking for broken links and orphaned pages;
• A keyboard-friendly WYSIWIG editor. Sometimes I want to play with HTML tags, but I'm usually creating readable content;
• Friendly management of stylesheets would be nice, even scripts, if that's your thing. (Personally, even rollovers are annoying and I refuse to use any scripting on my site, for compatibility reasons also.)

In short, anything that helps with the creation and management of content-based sites, on Linux, is what I hope Nvu will help me do. If the Nvu site is telling the truth, it looks like exactly what I'm after.

I want to believe this so badly

[starX]

but the words "Duke Nuke Em Forever" keeping playing through the back of my mind.

In all seriousness, I know a couple people who aren't ready to make the switch because of a "lack" of office and web authoring programs, and somehting that thinks it can rough up front page or dreamweaver might get a few more people to turn a more serious eye towards Open Source.

So now we just have to hope that it's not vapor- or underachiever-ware.

Quanta - an HTML editor for Linux, available now.

[Dani Filth]

Quanta is a kick ass IDE. There is an opensource version and a commercial version.

"Syntax highlighting with support for ColdFusion, XML, PHP, SQL, Python, Perl, DTML - Zope, C++ and HTML, with more to come"

Re:glad to see it (this will be OT)

[WindBourne]

You yours by hand. So do I, with vi. But my father has no desire to do that. I already suggested it and he has no desire to do it low-level. Apparently he now thinks that it is a bad idea.
What hard core tech ppl will do, many common folks will not. Personally, I use my father, a neighbor, and several friends as judges of what users will and will not accept on Linux distros. It has been interesting to see that they like Linux as a whole. One of the bigger problem is when I say "open a konsole" or a "open a terminal" or "open webmin" or "open an editor". The second that these folks go low-level, they hate it.

Re: FrontPage

[salesgeek]

It allows novices to easily create (generally bad) web content.

Last I looked, most web content fell into two categories:

a) generally bad
b) specifically bad

Seriously, FP is just a tool. It's only as good as the designer using it.

Re:It doesnt look promising it looks EXACTLY like

[Daniel Phillips]

The thing is just a rerelease of mozilla composer man.

I love Mozilla composer (now called "editor"). Anything that builds on it or makes it better is fine by me.

Emacs works great until...

[dsfox]

somebody comes along and edits your page using something else. Then you've got a pile of yuck, and you have to start using one too. But that's the price of collaboration.

Re:Who cares?

[Shulai]

I coadminister a network with 150 stations and ten servers. I also set up several boxes freelance, and most people considers me a proficient professional.

And, if you are able to read, I have no trouble using vi for my own stuff.

OTOH, I presume you do not have any idea of the economical and social situation here, and why I have or have not such job.

Re:Well!

[glazou]

Show you're a web author who cares about his visitors/readers : why do you think those empty paragraphs are here ?

Re: FrontPage

[sehryan]

Actually, thats a bit incorrect. The code that Frontpage produces is a mess, no matter how good the designer is using it.

Yeah. Shure.

[Qbertino]

"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."

And of course this Lindows guy is so much known for helping out the OSS community by supporting the developement of new, industry strength OSS components, other than, let's say, RedHat or SuSE who do nothing but mostly ripp off OSS projects, make them insecure by completely mangleing their intended setups and looks of them and giving them a public-awareness compliant 'flashy' name. And then issueing new-media-troll press-releases.

Errr... wait a minute...

Re:Yeah. Shure.

[Kevin Carmony]

You might want to check out... http://lindows.com/opensource

Posting before coffee is a dangerous thing to do..

[UncleRage]

...unfortunately for all of you, I'll try. ;)

I agree with the overall sentiment posted above concerning GoLive (and the fallout that other WYSIWYG editors receive by proxy). And as Adobe has adopted to make PHP a third party modular add-on, I think I won't be updating GoLive again. So, no arguments from me there...

What I find truly ironic is the inclusion of FrontPage as a sales pitch. Jesus, Frontpage?!? egads... I've always found FrontPage to be just about the clunkiest P.O.S. around. I know, I know... FrontPage means FrontPage extensions and god knows how much we need those (like more holes in our heads). But then again, think about it... it makes sense.

If claiming marketshare is the point, then that comparison is a great tool to pull part time web jockeys and designers (note: not developers) into the Linux fold. Sure, you can code in vi, emacs or pico... but John in accounting may not. Now... we can tempt him with OpenOffice + NVU as an (approaching) respectable MS Office replacement.

However, as long as Photoshop/ImageReady, Flash, Fireworks, etc... remain only Mac/Windows products, don't expect Web developers to jump ship from their current platform.

As far as it all goes, I'll probably not replace my Dreamweaver on the desktop and pico during ssh sessions anytime soon... Just like I'll probably not be replacing my Windows box for studio work, my Mac as my Linux box (now that iTunes hit windows, I don't really need to bugger my old G4 400 down w/ OS X anymore... ;) ) or my XBox/PS2 for games any time soon, either.

Ugh, all those words. Need coffee now.

Re:It doesnt look promising it looks EXACTLY like

[Ian Wolf]

Wouldn't that make it a perfect drop-in replacement for Frontpage?

Re:Who cares?

[Shulai]

That is right for you and for me.

Graphical designers do not work in that way. They are not nerds proud of watching blondes in the Matrix streams. They care about a lot of things nerds do not care, like proper use of fonts, colors, etc. That is what they are good in.

They fit Photoshop art in nested tables with lots of cells. Unless you have great abilities viewing the final results in your mind, it's a lot easier using Dreamweaver than vi.

And they are not nerds, and care about a lot of things we don't when editing pages.

Again, I agree, it's good to be able to write HTML. But there is much more people beyond hardcore nerds close mindset. And I used to be one, ten years ago.

FTP

[Knights who say 'INT]

I might be repeating someone, but I couldnt find any mentions to this while skimming the discussion. A much needed feature in web authoring environments is integrated FTP. I still use HTMLKit, a big, bloated, ugly piece of crippleware because of that.

Re:FTP

[Kevin Carmony]

This is exactly what Nvu does. Kevin

Re:FTP

[BugZRevengE]

my favorite editor is crimson editor:
http://www.crimsoneditor.com/
it supports remote files (ftp) i wish it had native ssh file transfer!
unfortunatly only available for windows.. but since work really only uses windows for workstations, it is ok.. if crimson was available unders linux i would definitly think about switching...

Well about WYSIWYG editors...what about

[H0rizon]

A regular HTML editor like Homesite or Editplus, whats a equivalent for that program on Linux?

Re:Well about WYSIWYG editors...what about

[MrPink2U]

I have always preferred writing my HTML from scratch. Gives you the added benefeit of knowing what goes on behind that pretty page layout.

Quanta seems to do pretty well in this regard. It has decent syntax highlighting for quite a few web languages. Of course it is a KDE app so you need to have support for that. Your kinda screwed if your a lightweight window manager dude(tte).

Another oldie but goodie is VI (VIM if you desire). You don't even need X for this one!

Re:Well about WYSIWYG editors...what about

[H0rizon]

Well I am running Gnome, is my only option Screem which deals with color coded tags and what not? Thats all I need, color coded helps me a lot.

Re: FrontPage

[overunderunderdone]

The biggest reason I think FrontPage is so widely disliked is the tendency for people to use the built-in "themes"

No. The biggest reason it is so widely disliked is that it produces really crappy, bloated html. You might think that doesn't matter since the end user isn't looking at the ugly code but at the (usually ugly) page. Who cares about the ugly code as long as it works, right? I suppose thats true if you make the page once and then leave it alone. The problem is when you go back in and are using Frontpage to constantly change and maintain the page. When you delete an element it doesn't always delete all the funky tags around it, things start getting *really* ugly with the page all loaded up with bits of old html that (hopefully!) aren't doing anything. Eventually something breaks, weird things start to happen and Frontpage loses track of the crap it has created and even someone who knows html can't fix it because it's such a massive screwed up mess.

I agree that there's no reason that there can't be a decent WYSIWYG editor, FrontPage just isn't it. DreamWeaver creates nice code but it's a pro tool with a much steeper learning curve.

As for handwritten code - well, no canned solution will ever have the flexibility that you have if you do it yourself. There are plenty of text editors that will write the tags for you much like (and just as efficient as) the WYSIWYG tools. The main difference is that you are looking at the source rather than at the rendered page - for someone who does know html it really is better (more flexible & powerful) and often more efficient than a "user-friendly" tool. When I use DreamWeaver I use it the opposite of how they intended - instead of using the WYSIWIG tool and occasionally using the text editor, I use the text editor and occasionally use the WYSIWIG tool (it can be nice for quickly creating roll overs & such).

Re:lindows sucks ..

[jest3r]

Do your research.

M. Robertson purchased Xandros 1.0 ... added some new icons and marketing spin ... and voila you have Lindows.

Sry, but this one had to be

[Britz]

1. Take a successful comercial product
2. Try to rewrite it from the ground up with an open source license
3. Announce this on slashdot
4. Get a lot of kudos
5. ???
6. Profit

Mod parent up...

[hughk]

I disagree that it is trivial, but I do agree that it isn't that bad. Frontpage may contain much suckage but it does manage a site (as long as only one person does the updates). Where it falls down is when more than one person is updating the site.

Re:Mod parent up...

[illumina us]

oh no. Frontpage sucks at much more than that. FP puts much unneeded code into the page, it also uses FP extentions to create sites which are only accessable on IIS. Moreover, the bundled scripts are horrible, and take something of an 800MHz machine to run when it can be run on a 80MHz machine if you wrote the same function by hand. I do have to admit though, I do use FP... for making my tables, because it only takes about a minute when by hand it takes about five. Oh and the site management, preferably I'd rather do my own stuff rather than have a program do it for me, makes me feel more like I am doing the work not the program. I haven't seen FP used for anything but page editing, very rarely have I heard it used for site publication.

Re:Mod parent up...

[hughk]

I agree that the code produced isn't nice, but generally it works. The last version of FP that I used was 2000 and it was useable and the results looked ok under Moz. I didn't like some of the default stuff that it does, but it could be overridden.

However the client needed FP because they were using its management facilities, that is link checking, uploading only of changed files and so on.

Re:Who cares?

[lpp]

*sigh*

That's like saying if a particular model of car is too complex, perhaps they ought not to be able to visit their friends on the other side of town, even though the car in question will actually heal the environment, makes happy beams and heals the sick, cures cancer, etc.

Linux as an environment can be a useful and good thing. It can be more stable, cheaper to operate, able to perform well on older hardware, and makes available a plethora of excellent software titles. But currently a lot of people shy away from it, either because they perceive it as too complex or because it truly is too complex for them to use.

But Linux is still just an environment, a means to an end, not an end itself. People don't run Windows just to run Windows. They don't just stare at the desktop (not without being fired in short order anyway). They try to perform a task, run software on it. It's the same with Linux. And if they could perform that task better on Linux, either due to direct improvements in the Linux version or because the environment doesn't interfere as much as the Windows environment does, then perhaps it might be a useful and good thing for the environment to be made less complex or made to seem less complex to those would otherwise be interested.

Isn't this where open source falls apart?

[NotClever]

"WE need a FREE fullblown accounting system"

To develop a 'boring' system like an accounting system, especially a full featured, stable one with things like tax table updates and all that other stuff is what people do when they get paid to do it. If I remember right, a while ago there was a thread on /. about Gnucash not having any interest from developers anymore besides the core one or two. Imagine what it would be like getting a bunch of people to write a system 10x more complicated, with little chance of getting any renumeration for it... Writing Linux code is 'cool' because you're striking a blow for freedom. Writing Gimp is cool because who doesn't like nifty graphics? Writing stuff for OpenOffice is cool because, again, you're striking a blow for freedom. Spending 3 years full time writing a full fledged accounting system so you can give it away is cool why?

If I spent that amount of time to do something, I'd like to get paid for it.

For those of you who say that a company could fund it and give it away, I ask... Why should they?

Re:Isn't this where open source falls apart?

[Lumpy]

bingo! my point exactly.

90% of the time someone whines that something is not available on linux is because they wont pay for it.

Accounting software IS available for linux. you have to buy it.

now if I could buy a video editing solution that was decent I'd do it in a second (if it didn't cost as much as a house)

Re:Isn't this where open source falls apart?

[VisorGuy]

If I spent that amount of time to [develop open source software], I'd like to get paid for it.

I'd just like to point out that just because a software is open source doesn't mean that you can't charge money for it.

Last I heard Red Hat was one of many profitable companies who charge money for open source software & services.

Re:Isn't this where open source falls apart?

[NotClever]

Yeah, I understand that. But if you are going to *sell* it, then it eliminates the subject of the parent topic about needing a free accounting system (like OpenOffice fits the bill on the Office front kinda).

I would rephrase your statement to "... one of several profitable ...' - don't know about 'many'...

Take care.

Cool!

[jav1231]

I've been wanting a good WYSIWYG html editor for Linux. However, on the NVU site their "screenshots" link has only one screenshot. But it looks promising!

Re: FrontPage

[Planesdragon]

The code that Frontpage produces is a mess, no matter how good the designer is using it.

No. FP can be set to make "non-messy" code.

Take a look at my website--specifically one of the second-level pages. http://www.castlesteelstone.us/opengaming.htm for example.

The HTML isn't the best in the world, but it's hardly a "mess"--and it was done in Frontpage.

lindows history.

[Suppafly]

Considering that nearly every lindows branded app is really just a rebranded opensource project, I wonder which opensource project they are going to rip off for this.

Sounds like its mozilla based.. anyone know of an opensource project that is mozilla based that does this?

Re:It doesnt look promising it looks EXACTLY like

[JohnMunsch]

I know "Hallelujah Brother" isn't much of a comment but that's what I really want to say. Composer is off to an excellent start. Having more people contribute to it and make it better is awesome.

The name sucks

[bonch]

Sorry, but the name sucks! "Nvu?" Again, I have to complain about a ridiculous name for an OSS project. Why does this keep happening? Is there a sworn policy against normal, sane names in favor of awful-looking, unpronouncable in-jokes from the developers?

"I use Frontpage 2003!"

"I use...in-voo...nuh-voo...en-vee-you...fuck it, just trust me."

Re:The name sucks

[renderhead]

Maybe it's one of those clever recursive acronyms that geeky programmers love so much. "Nvu's Very Useful"? I'll bet that would make a whole lot of people laugh until Red Bull came out of their noses.

I'm skeptical.

[Sj0]

I don't know. I've always thought of mozilla as "Frontpage for linux". In fact, I've found it to be superior in ways to Frontpage for Windows, for reasons such as greater stability, better standards compliance (Remember that IE's "standards" aren't even consistent between versions), smaller code, and infinitely better price. I did some commercial work with it a couple years back, and found it to be fine for intranet pages, and I haven't done a personal website in ages without it.

Re: FrontPage

[Suppafly]

Sorry, but I have to throw my two cents in here. I've been helping my Dad work out a web site for the union he's in (I love him to death, but damn... how hard is it to make a freaking tag?)

Just take it over, it sounds like it wouldn't be a hard side project, and a union should have no problem paying someone for their skilled labor.

Re:SQL-Ledger LiveCD

[wrecked]

There is a Knoppix-derived LiveCD version of SQL-Ledger. Although it seems to be default German, you might be able to boot it into English with the 'knoppix lang=en' boot option. http://www.knoppix.net/docs/index.php/KnoppixCusto mizations Look for it here:

Makes me wince..

[Raunch]

to hear someone use a sentence that compares frontpage and dreamweaver as though the two products were even close to the same level. If you are rivaling frontpage, than you are not rivaling dreamweaver. If you are rivaling dreamweaver, then don't compare your product to frontpage.

It's like the gimp crew putting out that the gimp is like microsoft paint.

Besides, these things are already out there. I think that the best one that I found was Bluefish. It doesn't rival dremveaver, but it blows frontpage out of the water.

[from sourceforge] Bluefish is a powerful editor for experienced web designers and programmers. Bluefish supports many programming and markup languages, but it focuses on editing dynamic and interactive websites.

But Linux already has a web authoring tool!

[ENOENT]

/usr/bin/vi

Unless

[Schwartzboy]

Well, I can imagine that it would be fine to use "like Frontpage" in the context of "this app with run, look, feel, behave, and function nothing like Frontpage".

I highly recommend using "like Frontpage" all over the place if he's using it that way.

Sorry, Michael...

[mwood]

...one of the things I greatly admire about Linux is that it does *not* have a FrontPage clone. Creating one would be a case of *subtracting* value from the base product. :-P

Our Intentions (from the President of Lindows.com)

[Kevin Carmony]

We have 60 employees. More than half are engineers, but we DO have business, marketing, sales, accounting, HR, etc. people working here as well...all dedicated to one thing...Bringing Desktop Linux to the masses. These non-technical employees enjoy using Linux on their computers, but they too would like to be able to create web pages WITHOUT having to become a full-time programmer. Our intentions with Nvu are very simple: - Create a very easy-to-use web authoring SYSTEM (not just an "HTML editor" but a SYSTEM for managing the site easily as well) for NON-technical people. For Linux to thrive on the desktop, it needs solid, easy-to-use products for USERS not just Engineers (web browsers, email clients, office suites, and yes...web authoring systems). - Keep the product 100% open source. We used the MPL because we're based on Mozilla code. We are HAPPY to see anyone use the Nvu code in ANY way they like. There are absolutely no strings attached to our contribution to Nvu. We just want to see this "hole" in desktop Linux filled. - We're thrilled to be paying Daniel Glazman (lead contributor for Composer) so that he can focus full energy on Nvu. Composer was in real danger of being orphaned and left behind with the current breaking up of the Mozilla suite, and all the main focus going to the web browser and email client. We didn't want that to happen! - We are contributing SERIOUS money, servers, bandwidth, engineering resources, code, marketing, and so on to see this project through to not only the end, but on an on-going basis. Where would Mozilla be without AOL's past sponsorship (via both Netscape code and $$$)? Where would OpenOffice be without Sun's funds and sponsorship? Open source is great, but it's even better when it can be fueled with funds with no strings attached. Nvu is just one of MANY open source projects we here at Lindows.com fund and support: http://lindows.com/opensource We want to see DESKTOP Linux thrive. That's our soul goal. Thanks, Kevin Carmony President, Lindows.com

Re: FrontPage

[salesgeek]

Actually, thats a bit incorrect. The code that Frontpage produces is a mess, no matter how good the designer is using it.
This reminds me of arguments from back in the day about generated assembler vs. hand written assembler. Regardless, FP doesn't generate that bad of HTML - often it contains a lot of nbsp and font= that are unnecessary, but overall, it isn't that bad. You can usually carve more bandwidth from resampling graphics than you can by reducing 400 bytes of text anyway.

Re:It doesnt look promising it looks EXACTLY like

[Creepy]

At least you can read the HTML code Composer generates. Frontpage, to Microsoft's credit, generates somewhat readable/servicable HTML code, as long as you know CSS (and VB/VBS if you have the misfortune of some Microsoft junkie shoving it in... like I do sometimes).

Word, on the other hand, generates the worst HTML I have ever seen. Some of the code I've generated with it (because of a corporate mandate, mind you) had both a style sheet and font assigned to every character. My attempt to edit it to fix a typo with vi failed utterly because I couldn't find the word amidst all the garbage. This file was ~512k and basically 3 pages of text. I copied the text and recreated it in Mozilla composer - and got a whopping 25k file.

Re: FrontPage

[Kyouryuu]

I only partially agree. My problem with FrontPage is that it creates some really nasty HTML code as output. This was certainly true of version 2002 and, unless they changed something drastic, is also true of version 2003. Take a look at a web page composed in Dreamweaver and you'll find it's much cleaner to read.

For a time, I had been using FrontPage to manage a very large web site. When I lost the ability to use FrontPage, I was forced to convert it all by hand back to legible handtyped HTML. Let me tell you, it was a messy and arduous task. Though I was successful in doing it, it didn't stop me from going out and getting Dreamweaver MX to manage the site.

The other thing I dislike about FrontPage is the ease by which people can add annoying widgets to their web pages. Scrolling marquees, flashing text, all are things to be avoided by professional web designers. But FrontPage puts them all right out in the open as if they are expected features. Not only are they shunned, but Microsoft's implementation of them only solidifies the dominance of Microsoft's Internet Explorer and pseudo-HTML nonsense.

One thing I've noticed...

[bonch]

One thing I've noticed about most of those elite pricks who praise simple text-editors as the "only" way to do HTML is that their websites are usually OSS or bio sites that have no color schemes (just black text on white background), one or two pages, no tables, and a few links scattered around. Mostly, their content is just paragraphs of text, and as a whole, the site is very generic and ugly. Have you seen www.gnu.org? People's obsession with simplicity and non-bloat (no doubt stemming from their obsessive Microsoft hatred) have made them produce sites that are uglier than crusted dog shit. For the most part, programmers and hackers are not good artistic designers, and it shows, and I think that's why it's taken so long for us to get a visual tool like this--the stupid "l33t" attitudes have kept it away.

If you're doing a heavy graphics-intensive site for a professional company in which things need to be perfectly aligned, graphics need to match, and you're using a visual template you created for all 20 of your pages, you'd be a complete idiot to continue your elite attitude about a freakin' text editor.

Sometimes, the immature attitudes I see in this community amaze me. No professionalism at all...is it also bad to use visual editors when you design GTK or QT dialogs? When you're drawing pictures in GIMP (real people write those pixels using assembly routines)? Should OpenOffice not show you its formatting visually, instead just giving you its internal formatting codes and letting you have at it?

I don't get the animosity towards WYSIWYG HTML editors when the philosophy is embraced everywhere else. Why are HTML editors the target for that misinformed attitude? It's not like HTML is l33t knowledge that deserves an award or anything. And all the visual editors let you edit the code directly anyway. "I use vim!" I don't really care. Give me a tool that lets me do more than freakin' ugly www.gnu.org without wasting time wading through code when I could be--heaven forbid--designing visually.

Re:One thing I've noticed...

[gregfortune]

The code for Terabyte Triangle's website was done entirely with text editors. Note that it's all pretty and stuff, but it isn't littered with all kinds of extra markup crap that WYSIWYG editors tend to produce...

Really, HTML isn't *that* hard. And if you're feeling like a techie demi-god, you might take a look at PHP, Zope, or (gag) ASP.

is it also bad to use visual editors when you design GTK or QT dialogs?
No, I love Qt Designer, but then again, I never have to edit the code it produces directly. I subclass, whip out Nedit, and go to work. HTML WYSIWYG editors can't offer anything like that 'cause you can't really subclass "HTML" (although you can do cool things like that with PHP/ASP.NET/etc).

WYSIWYG has it's place for one-off, small websites, but if you are designing commercial sites, bite the bullet and learn something a little more powerful.

btw, is the Perl at http://www.slackersguild.com/ created in Frontpage? Didn't think so. Probably built by guy with a text editor. Heck, it looks like the /. code base...

Re:One thing I've noticed...

[renderhead]

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.

Re:Looks promising-Alphabet soup.

[Creepy]

I don't know about you, but I found Amaya a mess from a usability perspective. It took me several hours to generate a serviceable web page, where I did a much better version in Mozilla composer in about 20 minutes. As far as I'm concerned, Amaya is only useful for testing XHTML conformance at the moment. Most web pages don't need to be XHTML compliant, so it probably isn't worth the bother at the moment.

I've never used Quanta, but it looks similar to both Mozilla and Frontpage. Style sheet editor looks nice from screenshots.

SodiPodi would be an interesting thing to add (it's a graphics editing/alignment tool), on the other hand, it's probably better as a separate tool (to avoid bloat). I still use Photoshop 4 for most of my graphics editing (Student version, graduated before 5 came out and couldn't afford the upgrade to pro... not that I need it).

Not just for Lindows

[Tin Foil Hat]

Since Lindows is Linux afterall, this new composer should work just fine for all distributions.

Re:Quanta - an HTML editor for Linux, available no

[Kevin Carmony]

You can't edit in WYSIWYG mode with Quanta. That's the whole idea of Nvu, to make it EASY to edit a web page with NO HTML knowledge. Quanta is fine for HTML programmers, but my secretary wouldn't have a clue how to use it, but she can use Nvu. Kevin

Re: FrontPage

[Reziac]

I went to the initial Frontpage preview event. Per that, originally FP was meant as a site MANAGEMENT tool, not as an editor per se; the editor part kinda got shoveled in as an afterthought.

And it did make embarrassingly bad HTML for a long time, but the last two versions have gotten MUCH better; FP2002 is mostly fairly nice, and no longer "rude" in how it handles existing files.

But I still went back to old AOLpress, which (whether you use it in raw or WYSIWYG mode) makes THE cleanest HTML I've ever seen. I wish AOL would release AOLpress' source... it needs some work and a general update, but the basic program is very sound.

Re:Vaporware

[VisorGuy]

I predict Longhorn comes out before Lindows, anyway.

Comes out?? As in out of the closet??
Well, now that you mention it, "Longhorn" does sound like some sort of gay pseudonym...

AFAIK Lindows.com has already released a Linux distribution... I'm not absolutely certain of this (similar to how some are not certain we went to the moon) because I haven't used it myself.

Random Clue dispensial

[Planesdragon]

Word, on the other hand, generates the worst HTML I have ever seen.

Yep. To ensure "round tripping" of documents, MS created proprietary tags to include all of the Office document information that isn't part of HTML (such as page breaks, section info, etc.)

If you're using office 2000, there is a downloadable tool that will generate "cleaner" HTML--and, AFAIK, both XP and 2003 have similar options.

Isn't Quanta Plus supposed to do the same thing ?

[cyrus007]

Whay not use Quanta Plus or enhance it to be able to replace FrontPage/Dreamweaver MX ? The basics in QP are there, it just needs added tools to handle scripting better and be able to use new standards like XML and XML namespaces and should be automaically able to create a document based on a set of standards.

Re:Oh boy. This is sad..

[Reziac]

True for FP prior to FP2000, but I guess they got tired of being the laughingstock of the online world, because FP2000 and later makes reasonably clean, tolerably readable code. Better than the mess Dreamweaver now makes, for sure -- when I went to clean up the last page I worked on in DW (4 and MX), I was soon ready to kill Macromedia's developers. Slowly. With a dull fork.

Back to M$... VisualStudio.NET, that's another beast -- that makes about the ugliest HTML under the hood I'd seen in years.

Where's the Macintosh Beef?

[Fished]

Yeah, but no Mac version since May and no source. Sucks.

Re:Sorry to burst your bubble, but...

[dan_bethe]

Oh my. I just read the stories you linked to. Thanks for the info. Just before posting that, I had done a google search on it and I read http://appgen.com and it looked fine! The site's working and everything.

Oh well! We'll see what happens with the code escrow. Could be a huge advantage if it works out, or if some VARs buy it because they'll most likely want to open the source. Thanks!

Text *and* WYSIWYG

[axxackall]

But you have to admit that Vim is definitely not for everyone.

That's way (X)Emacs is around here: both text (through html-mode) *and* wysiwyg (through w3m-mode) html editor.

Lack of understanding of apps like Dreamweaver

[bushboy]

I swore by handcoding until Dreamweaver hit the scenes.

I've been doing websites since 1995 and work on graphically 'enhanced' websites mainly - good solid design with medium graphic usage.

It's got easier as time goes on - apps like dreamweaver have made it easier.

The HTML code is virtually 100% clean, depending on the preferences you set. The Wsiwyg view and editing is unrivaled from a simplicity and speed point of view. The learning curve is a little steep, but easily possible.

Put it this way, you can knock out a quick and dirty html as fast as a text document.

Office HTML Filter

[hether]

This feature to save as only occurs in the newer versions of word. In some of the older versions you could download a little add-on called the Office HTML Filter that accomplished the same thing. It's available at:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?fa milyid=209adbee-3fbd-482c-83b0-96fb79b74ded&displa ylang=en

FrontPage HTML

[phorm]

But what will we use to clean the frontpage-generated code?

Re:WYSIWYG is the important thing

[Aqua OS X]

Bah... Nesting DIVs can be a good thing. DIVs are great place to apply classes and IDs for large blocks that would be better off with table constraints.

Furthermore, DIVs are fairly crucial once you start building complex CSS sites.

shess.... Eric Meyer would probably bitch slap you right now ;) http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/css/

Re: FrontPage

[lobotomy]

After having to fix up the crappy pages produced by Front Page, I documented a nice example of the crap it produces. See my diatribe here:

http://pah.cert.ucr.edu/~bob/shameful.shtml

This example is just one small section from one page. The person who created it was a web-novice, but a computer expert. Even he couldn't get Front Page to produce decent HTML (I don't think anyone can).

Re: FrontPage

[hamster foo]

LOL, nice link. I can almost feel your frustration.

Look on the bright side, it's a LOT better than the export to HTML feature in MS Publisher. I dealt with a customer one time who was wondering why her pages were loading so slow. Turns out it was producing pages in excess of 1 meg that could all be reduced to something in the neighborhood of 100k. Truly a scary experience.

W3C-compliance?

[spicedhamhawg]

I hope the HTML of their website isn't an example of NVU output. Even at a casual glance, it's obviously not W3C-compliant. Granted, they don't claim it will be, they merely claim it works with most popular browsers, but to make yet another HTML editor that does not produce W3C-compliant code would be reprehensible. We not only need an open source product like this, we need one that produces 100% W3C-compliant HTML. It's not just the right thing to do, it's a selling point. With it, you can claim that NVU isn't just better because it's open source (something some people would argue with) but that it's better because it produces the best output.

If a solution is open source and available at no charge, some people will use it because it's free, whether or not it produces the best output (if they even know what W3C-compliance is; a lot of people who are into WYIWYG either don't know or don't care (IMO)), and some will opt for a proprietary product, even if expensive, if that's the one that does the best job. If you can point to a product and say "Not only is it open source and available at no charge, it also produces the best HTML" then you can really hook people.

Their web site seems dead

[rsilvergun]

clicking on "order" takes me to drkoop.com. Not a good sign...

Um, what makes you think

[rsilvergun]

that in this economy I can't get away with paying a secretary _with_ accouting skills $25000/yr? Actually, I'm a wage slave, and I don't like the situation any better than any other wage slave. But facts are facts. With more and more jobs going overseas the U.S.A. is heading for second world country status (i.e. lots of very rich, a few getting along, and tens of millions of hopelessly poor). Now if something gets done about the flow of labor overseas, businesses won't get away with this. Then again if the cost of a good secretary with an accounting background goes up, won't the same be said for a CPA?

That said, you make a good point about average computer users being afraid of what you or I would consider illrelavent. But I question your asusumption that Microsoft will still save you money. Just ask Ernie Ball (look him up on google if you haven't heard the story). My point is, with the release of longhorn and all the nasty things that go along with it, businesses will be trying to jump the Microsoft ship whether their secretaries like it or not. So in the short run, yes, I'll lose money. But I'll make it back by not paying subscription fees and not buying new hardware every time Microsoft feels it's time for a new product cycle. Besides, it's kinda nice not worrying about the BSA.

Re:Um, what makes you think

[Bodrius]

- If the salary of a FUNCTIONAL accountant goes down to 25K, sure, you can get away with that. By then the salary of the CPA will have gone down dramatically as well, though.
However, I think you're missing my point. The question is not whether you can find someone with skills to work for 25K/year. The question is whether that person is being paid enough (from the POV of the employee and the market) for the accounting responsabilities to assume them, excel in the job, and deal with the potential consequences of failure.
Example: in the current market you can find very cheap IT labor. But you cannot just put any coder/IT-person in the role of CTO at the same salary. You may have to pay less (much less) for the CTO than before, but you still have to deal with the fact that the job implies other responsabilities and requires different compensation.

- Regarding Microsoft saving money, let me quote myself in the original message:

"Since so many people got confused, I'll be specific:

Linux needs a Quickbooks clone because providing an alternative for the company accountant (CPA or not) removes one of the few remaining Big Reasons not to switch the whole company to Linux, which is where you can see the savings."

There are many cases where Linux does not save significant amounts of money per workstation, and this is one of them. Linux saves significant amounts of money per company, however, and allows you to keep a loose coupling of your business strategy from Microsoft's (or anyone's).

Actually, I expect, as Linux grows in acceptance, that its existence will save money for both Linux and MS users, because MS and other companies will be forced by the new market to deal with users differently.

Re:Who cares?

[lee7guy]

Did you even read my comment? Did you quote at random?

Your rant included almost everything except my point: It is easier designing something when you can see what you are designing.

Also, it is markup, not code. Just because Dreamweaver calls it code view doesn't give you license to be dense.

WTF!?

Maybe I was using dreamweaver to write javascript, fuckhead.

Re:It doesnt look promising it looks EXACTLY like

[gui_tarzan2000]

The biggest thing missing from Mozilla Composer is the ability to create form elements... why, oh why, haven't they added this feature?

Huh? I just created a form last night using Composer that has radio buttons and fields for user input. I'm brand new to making forms, so I might be missing something. What elements are you talking about?

Re:Who cares?

[SteamedPenguin]

I can't help it if you can't find the refresh button on a browser... See what you are designing... How do you handle writing C++? Do you use 'Design View' too? ;)

But it won't be Frontpage!

[rootyard]

But it won't be Frontpage! It won't support Frontpage extensions. What good will it be?

finally

[PC_Detonator]

finally a wysiwyg editor for linux :) perhaps the time has now come to abuse IE like frontpage does with mozilla :D

I can't wait to make my first mozilla-only web site with it ;)

The major drawback of Mozilla Composer

[the_olo]

...in comparison with FrontPage, is that in Frontpage when you switch between HTML Source and WYSIWYG views, the state of selection is preserved and the scrolled viewport is positioned to show the selected fragment. Mozilla Composer loses selection and goes to the beginning of document whenever you switch views.

So in Frontpage you can select a link or an image, switch to HTML source and check their HTML representation instantly. Then in HTML source view you can select a fragment of HTML code and switch to WYSIWYG view - you'll have the object corresponding to selected source preselected.

Re:The major drawback of Mozilla Composer

[EMR]

Did you consider searching the mozilla bugzilla databse for this feature request? And if not there submitting a feature request to the mozilla bugzilla database? They won't know it's a problem unless someone submits it..

Re:The major drawback of Mozilla Composer

[the_olo]

Yes, there's a long time unfixed bug (number 47040 from year 2000, with lots of duplicates!).

Re:Exactly-Outsourcing the click.

[pyrrhonist]

And moreover, how dare you complain about my "fucking" country being poor as it is

I didn't say that, dipshit.

Have any clue about American multinationals plundering our natural resources ( eg. tea and rice ) ?

Have you any clue about what your own people are doing?

Our standard of living would be pretty high by now if your billionnaires stopped funneling profits done in our "fucking" country back to America and bribing our corrupt politicians to be able to continue doing it.

Bullshit.

You're a victim of your national economics, deal with it.

And you're a fucking asshole. Go ask an untouchable what he thinks of you.

Ya know, it occurs to me

[rsilvergun]

you could get all the benefits of that fiscal responsibilty at a fraction of the costs by writing accounting software easy enough for a secretary and including a powerful backend for CPAs that allowed them to quickly audit the secretary's work. Have your secretary do the day to day data entry, then once a month your CPA looks over the books and fixes mistakes. Heck, outsource the audit to India (hospitals do it for X-Rays, which has at least as much liability involved) and you get all the benefits of a pro CPA without the costs.

Ok, not all the benefits, but business is about calculated risk. A part time accountant at $200/hr gets $208,000/yr. That kinda money would buy a lot of advertising for a 100 man operation. Heck, if you do have a problem, a few years of that kinda money and you could hire a lawyer good enough to get you out of almost anything.

Re:Ya know, it occurs to me

[Bodrius]

Uh?!

Isn't that what Quickbooks is all about?

I don't know of anyone who pays the 60K/year CPA to do data entry. They audit (throughly) the entries made by other people, although sometimes more often than once a month. They also have to define the accounting methods to be used, prepare legal paperwork, and be available for consultation on demand.

On the same vein, I don't know anyone who pays a manager to type memos, a lawyer to write briefs, a developer to type lines of code. Those are means to the ends they are hired for, and more often than not can be accomplished by assistants. Their 1337 data entry skills are not the point.

You are right that a lot of companies don't need a full-time 60K/year CPA, just like a lot of companies don't need full-time lawyers. That's why there are plenty of accounting and legal firms whose services they can retain.

Having no accountant in the loop however, is just asking for trouble.