Introducing Nvu, A Web-Authoring Application

An anonymous reader writes "MozillaZine is reporting that the first public beta of Nvu has been released. "What's that?", I hear you cry. Well, Nvu (pronounced 'N-View', short for 'New View') is a new open source WYSIWYG Web page creator/editor with FTP facilities that produces standards-compliant code. It is based on Mozilla Composer and is being developed by ex-Netscape employee Daniel Glazman's new company, Disruptive Innovations, under licence for Lindows.com. All the code for Nvu will be released back into the wild under the MPL/LGPL/GPL tri-licence. More information is available in the Nvu FAQ. Users of LindowsOS, other Linux distributions and Windows 98 and later can download Nvu 0.1 now." TheWanderingHermit writes points out that the feature list includes "(finally!) the ability to include and edit forms."

Comments

Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have some questions. Hope somebody can provide good answers to these. (More on this as we go.)

1. Will this program be better than Dreamweaver? ("Sure, someday" is not good enough. I mean realistically, in the foreseeable future. If this program with the silly unpronounceable name is projected to be about as good as Dreamweaver is now in a year to eighteen months, then Dreamweaver will be 12-18 months better by then, which means this new thing is behind the curve.)

2. Assuming it's better than Dreamweaver at all, will it be sufficiently better to justify the cost in time, effort, and money that went into developing it? ("It's not Macromedia" or "it's not licensed" aren't good answers. Who cares about that stuff? All that matters is the quality of the tool. Leave the politics and religion out of this.)

3. Would the time spent working on this project not be better spent working on something else? (Don't tell me that choice is good. It's not, by itself, good. Having the option of choosing among several good things is good, but having a number of crappy options isn't. Also, forget the "they can work on what they want" thing. It's true, but who cares? We're talking about whether their time was well spent, not whether they're allowed to spend it this way. They can spend their time masturbating and eating chee-tos, too, but nobody will argue that they should.)

4. Finally, does the world really need another half-assed HTML editor? Haven't we pretty well got that problem licked?

Re:My Letter to Nvu Regarding Source

[Twylite]

Let me translate your own letter for you:

Hi. Nice project, but I think you could be violating the GPL. I'm too rabidly Stallmanist to bother reading other licenses, and my statement is based entirely on hearsay anyway, but I'm making it your responsibility to address my problems.

By not even bothering to find out about the other licenses, or if the source code is really unavailable, you are showing complete disrespect for the time, effort and finance that has gone into this project.