HTML Editor you would like to have!

This is one of my most requested items but up until now I've not been able to give any product my hearty endorsement. There have been any number of contenders: Amaya for example, impressed with its standards compliance but was incomplete while Selida looked slick but had too many bugs. Finally a worthy contender has arrived on the scene in the form of the Open Source Nvu.

In reality Nvu is nothing new but rather a reworking of the old Netscape Composer. Composer was always a solid product and the revamp has lifted the product into another class. Here is an HTML editor and site manager that's easy enough for beginners to use but powerful enough to build large sites. It's closer in concept to Microsoft's FrontPage more than any other product but unlike FrontPage it, thankfully, produces standards compliant code. Its easy-to-use WYSIWYG editor will delight HTML newbies while HTML honchos can simply click a tab to switch to code view. Multiple tabs can be kept open to allow simultaneous editing and there is excellent support for forms, tables and templates. An internal spell-checker is included. CSS is handled through the CaScadeS editor from Mozilla Composer. Nvu also has the handy ability to call W3C's HTML validator from within the product. It's also extensible via XUL.

Nvu can upload files to your site via FTP and has some basic site management features but this is not its strength. Indeed the FTP side of the program has proved so problematic for some users that they have switched to using an external FTP client for uploading their sites. Overall it's an impressive product; no, it's not a replacement for commercial products like DreamWeaver but those looking for a competent, free, easy to use, WYSIWYG HTML editor need look no further.

If you want an editor that puts you closer to the code then you might consider 1st Page 2000. It's a free, earlier version of Evrsoft's [2] excellent 1st Page 2006 editor and while lacking many of the features of the latter, is still an excellent product. It's not the best choice though for HTML newbies. Note: The download seems to have been removed from the vendor's site. It is available elsewhere though [3].


[1] http://www.nvu.com/ Free Open Source, Windows 98 and later plus Linux, 6.57MB
[2] http://www.evrsoft.com
[3] http://www.voodoofiles.com/4836 Free, Windows 98 and later, 5.2MB