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NVU is Not Quite Ready for Primetime
This week I used NVU to redesigning my blog Mental Ground Zero. NVU is an open source project that is based on Mozilla Composer. It is an attempt to build an easy to use HTML visual HTML editor that can offer the Linux and open-source communities a quality alternative to Microsoft Frontpage. The NVU project is funded by the company formerly known as Lindows A.K.A. Linspire. While it is not hard to surpass Frontpage I found that NVU has a long way to go before it earns a place in a professional web designers toolkit.
This is a 0.2 release and it is no where near being considered finished. You need to already have HTML coding skills But it does kick much ass as a CSS editor since it incorporated the CaScadeS extension for Mozilla Composer. IT can be considered a quick stand alone application based on the common Mozilla code like Firefox and Thunderbird.
It has a limited FTP publishing capability and it shows promise in it's ability to edit and publish a remote file on a web server. Filezilla helped me do the rest of the FTP work on this project.
Had some CSS saving issues when you are trying to set up an external CSS style sheet and most CSS Divs had to be coded by hand. However the simple text editors were all CSS based and produced pretty good in-line style code. NVU is pretty rough and it works better as a CSS editor for an existing site design. The coolest part is using a program based on the browser is that you get a 100% real time view of what your design is going to look like in Mozilla.
Then I ran into some problems.
I had problems with the program reformatting non HTML MovableType specific tags to HTML special characters thus breaking the MT tags. It would not let me change the Doctype to XHTML. It would use invalid XHTML BR tags. What I had to do is to save my web page as pure, then make my design changes and then manually incorporate the new design into my MT templates using a text editor. There is no pre-made Javascript widgets and you pretty much had to put it together any Javascript yourself if you wanted it. The same goes for Flash and other multimedia plug-ins.
I don't think I will be using it unless I have CSS editing to do. It is only a 0.2 release and it's problems almost out weigh it's advantages but it shows lots of promise and hopefully it will shape up into a top notch open-source application in a couple months. It is great for people who are looking to do simple web publishing but it has a ways to go before it gives Dreamweaver a run for it's money.
Jake at May 5, 2004 
WebDev
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