The Nvu Web Authoring System

Nvu (pronounced N-view) is a graphical web authoring application from Linspire. Nvu is intended to be an open-source alternative to Microsoft FrontPage and Macromedia Dreamweaver, it is designed for the non-technical user. It is an open-source project, the code has been released under an MPL/LGPL/GPL tri-license. Daniel Glazman, the chief architect for Mozilla Composer, has been contracted by Linspire to be the lead developer and maintainer for the Nvu project. Nvu is based on the Mozilla Composer code, it relies on the Gecko layout engine for rendering HTML.

The main features of Nvu include:

• WYSIWYG web page editing.
• Creation of HTML code that works with most popular web browsers.
• Tabbed editing for working on multiple pages simultaneously.
• Independent undo/redo stacks for each tabbed window.
• HTML form, table, and template support.
• Support for Stylesheets.
• Integrated FTP file management for working remotely from the web server.
• An Nvu Site Manager GUI for managing web files and directories.
• A Color Picker GUI for visually selecting colors.
• A user-customizable toolbar for adding shortcuts.
• Extensibility via JavaScript add-ons.
• Support for calling the W3C's HTML validator.
• Support for the XHTML Friends Network (XFN).

Version 0.5 of Nvu was announced this week: "It include several enhancements in addition to: syntax highlighting, inbuilt spell checker, better horizontal and vertical rulers, Bidi control, smaller windows installer(6.5MB), etc."

The Nvu project FAQ explains the project in more detail. As with most GUI software, the screenshots reveal much of what the underlying code has to offer.

Linspire is planning on merging Nvu back into the main Mozilla CVS tree. The source code and a few binary distributions of Nvu are available here. It should be noted that the installation process for the binary tar file distributions is not well documented. A standard README file would be welcomed, as would .deb and .rpm files.

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