WaltBren's Nvu Review

WaltBren has posted a review on Nvu. Because it is a pain to register to a website just to post a comment for a blog post, the comment is here rather than under the original entry.

I will touch upon a few of the review points which I think need attention. Here they are one-by-one:

Graphical Head Tag Editor

That is the beauty of using Gecko as your backend. Just as with Firefox, Nvu too is capable of having extensions to increase its functionality. And if you haven't looked around, there has been a graphical head tag editor extension for Nvu since version 0.8 or 0.7. Other extensions include Nvu configuration editor, Launchy for Nvu, Venkman, etc. all are available from Nvu website or Mozdev NvuExt project.

CSS editor

Agreed that learning the CSS editor process has a longer learning curve, but that doesn't mean that it is worthless. After all, it's CaScadeS version 0.40. What do you expect from an extension which was primarily created as a proof of concept and hasn't gone much development over the last year as Nvu was being improved upon? Even then it's capabilities are as good as any other CSS editor; check out the Nvu demo done by only using the GUI components of Nvu complete with div tags, multi-column tableless layout, and absolute positioning. Also, check out the few pages on geocities maintained by Nvu only! And to top it all, for those who feel its a bit hard to work with the CSS editor, check out the 15 minute guide to CaScadeS.

Advanced Layout Suppport (DIV)

"limited CSS support"....what else does one want than CSS2.1 support (minus a few CSS definitions)? Also, for the DIV and column layout, check out the links in the paragraph above. I think Nvu is more capable of DIVs and column layouts than FPE(waltbren.com) and don't forget that Nvu produces standards compliant HTML and CSS code. But I do have a features request for it: Capability to add comments in stylesheet.

Bugs

No, your list is not significant as it doesn't include the most important bugs.. I can cite a few of them, but then again don't all softwares have bugs?

Online Help

Could you explain a little more in detail about wasn't available in the "online help"? Here in the Nvu community we volunteers try our best to have the documentation written in such a way that users can find the solution to their problems and that the explanations are self explanatory. Nvu includes the inbuilt Help Documentation, and then there is an Nvu user guide. Which online help were you referring to?.

I agree that there are a few bugs in Nvu, CSS editor is not as user friendly as it should be, source syntax highlighting isn't rendered live, etc. but the major point here is that Nvu is open source. It fills the long gaps of a true WYSIWYG HTML editor for the masses. It sticks to standards instead of giving you the code in a garbage bag. One of Firefox's brilliant feature is the ability to add new features with extensions and hence increasing Nvu's functionality. Nvu is still being developed and at version 1.0 it is already being talked in the same breadth with Frontpage and Dreamweaver.

On the other hand, I noticed that WaltBren.com's principal services include "Web Development Consultant". But they should know better to have their own website's links working in order to offer those services. Links at the bottom of the blog are broken! Do they want help in configuring their Wordpress blog?