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A first look at the Nvu Web authoring application
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CommentsI wanted to make a realistic comparison of the two programs and try, as much as possible, to eliminate my personal bias against Microsoft. I wanted to compare FrontPage and Nvu under the same OS. Since FrontPage does not offer a Linux version, I decided that running FrontPage in Linux under Wine would not be a fair test. Nvu offers both Linux and Windows versions, so for this comparison I decided to run Nvu and FrontPage under Windows ME, which I happened to have available.
The preliminary release of NVU is beta version 0.1. Considering that this is actually a continuation of the existing Mozilla Composer code, it might seem strange to call it a beta, but the Nvu project intends to make some fairly significant changes. Nvu intends to be fully compliant with all Web standards, and incorporates JavaScript editing and debugging, CSS, and other standard tools. But Nvu has a long wish list of features that will be added later as well. A quick comparison between NVU 0.1 and FrontPage 2000 gives a clear picture of where the project is aiming.
The Nvu interface
Anyone who has ever used Mozilla Composer will be at home in Nvu. The toolbars and menus have been beefed up slightly, and an Nvu Site Manager has been added to the left side of the screen, but overall it still feels like Composer. Frankly this suits me fine. Icons are comfortably large and clear, and menus are logical and intuitive. (Screenshots are available at the NVU Web site.)
The bottom of the Nvu main screen displays the traditional tabs for viewing pages in various modes, including Normal, HTML tags, HTML source, and a Preview mode to let you see what the finished product will look like. These viewing options are nothing new for Web editors. But Nvu does offer one major advantage -- tabbed editing. Just as Mozilla allows tabbed browsing of multiple pages, Nvu allows tabbed editing of multiple pages. This is a big help for casual users like me. I find it challenging to keep all the links and themes consistent when working with half a dozen pages. Being able to have everything right in front of my eyes while I am tinkering fits my work style perfectly. It is a small difference, but to me it is a significant one.
FrontPage also allows opening multiple pages, but requires a user to access each page separately via the Window menu.
While the ability to add new toolbars is common to both Nvu and FrontPage, I find the drag-and-drop interface in Nvu friendlier than wading through FrontPage menus. However, I did notice one bug. The FrontPage toolbars automatically wrap to fit a shrunken window. If the Nvu window is made smaller, the toolbar simply runs off the right side into oblivion, in both the Windows and Linux versions. This will likely be one of the minor glitches that get dealt with among the general bug fixes.
The emphasis that Nvu puts on simple convenience also applies to the new Site Manager utility. This innovation takes the Composer publishing utility, adds a file manager/FTP-type interface to it, and parks the whole arrangement neatly at the edge of the editing screen, allowing a user to view the entire structure of a Web site in a single window. For me this is a godsend, especially when I am in a hurry to make a quick adjustment to an existing site and then get on with my life.
The equivalent FrontPage version of the site manager utility consists of icons along the left side of the editing window. Clicking the icons allows you to access hyperlinks, folders, and other site elements. But once again, as it does with browsing multiple Web pages, FrontPage presents the information one screen at a time.
There is only one way that I know of to make a side-by-side comparison of anything at all in FrontPage. You must open another, separate, copy of the program. Aside from cluttering the screen, opening multiple instances of the same program clogs up Windows RAM pretty quickly.
Nvu's toolkit
| Nvu genesis |
|---|
|
Last fall Lindows CEO Michael Robertson discovered to his chagrin that some of his people had been consorting with the enemy (Microsoft). Specifically, part of the LindowsOS Web site bore the telltale traces of FrontPage. Robertson immediately launched a campaign to do something about it.
Further inquiry into the situation revealed there was no Web design application in the Linux market that could provide both ease of use and functional equivalence to FrontPage. Of course there are a multitude of HTML editors for Linux, but a simple WYSIWYG editor for Linux that would let a non-tech user handle the basics, or make simple changes on the fly without pain was nowhere to be found. The closest available option turned out to be Mozilla's Composer, and Composer did not come close to FrontPage's sophistication. In an ironic twist of fate which proves that Somebody Up There likes OSS, the Mozilla team was charting a new direction at the same time Robertson was beginning his investigation and had recently decided to break out the development of Composer into a separate project. Lindows immediately swooped down upon Daniel Glazman, coordinator of the Mozilla Composer project, and offered to sponsor continued development of the project as a standalone, full-featured WYSIWYG application. Thus Nvu (N-View) was born. |
Beyond the user interface, both products pack similar capabilities, but given that FrontPage has been around for more years than even Nvu's predecessors, Nvu has some catching up to do. I looked at several main features Web authors commonly use.
Graphics -- This is one area where the beta status of Nvu shows up. For now the graphic manipulation options in Nvu are limited to inserting existing images and adjusting their size, position, and borders -- basically the same functions Composer supports. Nvu had no difficulty importing the GIF, JPG, PNG or BMP files that I tried, but all the editing has to be done beforehand. Nvu also provides a snap-to-grid function as well as layers to keep things nice and neat.
FrontPage is equipped with a long list of graphic tools. Its membership in the Microsoft Office suite gives FrontPage the advantage of direct, fully compatible access to the output of PowerPoint, Draw, Word, and so forth. Nvu still has a long way to go in this area to catch up.
Forms -- The forms tool in Nvu is a bit rough for us ignorant types. All of the necessary tools appear to be in place, including a JavaScript debugger, but the user interface is a bit confusing. For now, FrontPage shows Nvu how it is done. Nvu needs to polish this tool to make things a little more user-friendly.
Tables -- Nvu seems to have tweaked the old Composer table editing abilities. The new table manipulation interface is slightly more sophisticated and seems a little smoother. Table manipulation options in Nvu are still not up to FrontPage standards, but they are getting there.
Frames -- Nvu hasn't done much with frames yet. I couldn't find any frame tools in Nvu release 0.1, but it is on the wish list at the Nvu site. I haven't seen too many new pages using frames lately, so it's not a top priority, but no doubt the tool will be included eventually.
Templates -- Nvu lacks any templates upon which to build a site. It does provide an example widget (a calendar) and obviously plans to add more widgets and templates later on. For now, I just use the FrontPage templates. So far they have all worked fine.
Conclusions
FrontPage has been on the market longer than some of its users have been alive, whereas Nvu isn't old enough to be potty-trained yet, and it shows. For instance, the Nvu properties menu includes an option to install "Extensions" which are supposed to add extra features to the editor. Clicking this icon takes you straight to the Mozilla project home page, where no mention of Nvu or Extensions are to be found. Obviously, this is one of the items that will be added later.
For quick, basic editing the general usability of Nvu is superior to FrontPage, in my biased opinion. For those functions that Nvu does handle I think it presents a simpler, more intuitive interface. New bells and whistles are in the works. Reading the Nvu FAQ and background documentation tells me that ultimately the Nvu team intends to include every option that FrontPage offers, and a few more besides.
However, if you need a full featured Web editor Nvu is simply not there yet. I can certainly wait; Rome was not built in a day. For a preliminary beta release Nvu looks promising. I personally estimate one, maybe two years at the outside, before Nvu starts displacing FrontPage as the Web editor of choice for non-technical users. But I am afraid that until that day finally arrives, FrontPage will have to stay on my hard drive.
Comments
on A first look at the Nvu Web authoring applicationNote: Comments are owned by the poster. We are not responsible for their content.
I hate required cookies too, but at my job our internal websites are setup that way. My compromise is to set all cookies to session only and have them automatically wiped out at then end of the session. If that means I have to "logon" everytime I go to a website, then that is what I do. If it becomes to much of a bother, then I don't use the website anymore.
When Newsforge switched to this new format, I created an account. After about 1 week it was too much of a bother, so I just post anon. Nobody here has an important enough opinion that they need to know who I am.
A main question I would ask is how many times the windows ME machine crashed while you were testing?
It didn't take long before I used the much more stable linux - even though it didn't have frontpage.
I can make good looking webpages without it - and have been happy with netscape(mozilla) composer for the little things.
Does Nvu produce standards-compliant, readable HTML/CSS? Seems to me that's the big question, and the one that could give Front Page a run for its money.
Looks like a nice program. Too bad there aren't any instructions to install it!
I have it downloaded and untarred, and there it sits. No README, no install instructions on the website. Hummph.
Just place the untarred map in your home directory and cd to that map and type<nobr> <wbr></nobr>./nvu at the CLI.
Already tried that. Doesn't work:
$<nobr> <wbr></nobr>./nvu
nsNativeComponentLoader: GetFactory(libwidget_gtk2.so) Load FAILED with error:
nvu-0.20/libgtkxtbin.so: undefined symbol: gdk_threads_lock
Give me a text editor, XHTML and CSS any time of the day over frontpage.
i have found them useful for one thing:
i write web applications with a lot of database interaction. frequently, i need to present a list of items from the database to the user, and the user then performs a number of operations on the items in that list. often, the query that generates the list of items is complex and expensive in terms of CPU cycles. by using frames, i can put the list in one frame and then the user can operate on the items in the list in the other frame. to achieve this without frames i'd either have to re-execute the query every time the user does something, or cache the list on the server, or pass the list back to the server in the POST operation and then pass it back to the client on the next page. by using frames, it just sits there on the client in its own frame without requiring any additional processing or caching.
if there were a way to achieve the same thing without frames i'd be glad to give them up.
The download is available at:
http://webperso.easyconnect.fr/danielglazman/whyN<nobr>v<wbr></nobr> u/nvu.html
(take the space out for the link)
The latest news and discussions are at:
http://webperso.easyconnect.fr/danielglazman/webl<nobr>o<wbr></nobr> g/index.php/Nvu
(take the space out for the link)
Version 0.2 is a big improvement over 0.1. I've been using 0.17 to create my webpages, and I love it. Give the latest version a try, and don't let this article put you off.
Anybody using MS Frontpage has immediatly lost any right to ever talk about web design. This is how bad it really is.
I agree. Regardless of the fact that millions of small business owners are using Frontpage to promote their businesses without being web design professionals, we must denigrate them into the ground for 1. creating web sites that work with 95% of the browsers in use, and we must 2. prevent them from engaging in coversation about wysiwyg web tools, because us cognoscenti of web design simply will never accept the fact that small business owners wish to promote their businesses without becoming experts in xml and php, and won't pay us for the priveledge of creating a site that is 100% w3c compliant, and yet doesn't render properly in 95% of the browsers out there.
That is exactly what small business owners need, to rake over the coals their customers that visit their sites, for not using a browser that meets with the approval of our ideals.
This attitude is evident on the Quanta mailing list. Any mention of wysiwyg brings out the complaints, even though their implementation of wysiwyg (not real wysiwyg) can be turned off. The mere fact that wysiwyg (or their version of it) is available as a feature on Quanta is enough to elicit howls of protest and complaints.
Sort of like the howls of protest of colorization of black and white movies years ago. It didn't matter that you can turn color off on your set, w-e m-u-s-t p-r-e-v-e-n-t o-t-h-e-r-s from viewing movies the way they like them, instead they must view movies in their proper format! They dare to not conform? That proves how 1. stupid they are, and 2. how they don't deserve to see the movies.
wysiwyg? That's for cowards and losers. No exceptions.
This attitude is what prevents browsers from evolving. Internet Explorer has not had any major updates to its rendering engine since 6.0 came out. It is woefully behind its competition in features (bad CSS 2 support, poor security model, no tabbed browsing, etc.) yet because it ships as the default with new boxes it holds on to the major portion of the market. This is unacceptable and needs to change.
Web standards are there for a reason. Microsoft and all the others on the standards commitees committed to building tools that use these standards. MS refuses to implement the standards that THEY helped create. Rolling over just because MS is the 800 lb. gorilla in the market is plain stupid.
Read up on what the experts think about MS's mistreatment of its users:
- <A HREF="http://news.com.com/2100-1032-5088642.html" TITLE="com.com">
Web developers want to light a fire under Microsoft to get better standards support in the company's Internet Explorer browser</a com.com>
- <A HREF="http://dean.edwards.name/IE7/intro/" TITLE="edwards.name">A user fixes IE's broken CSS suport</a edwards.name>
Link checking of all pages built in, not using a script from somewhere else, or a app plugged into Nvu, something that most wysiwyg authoring tool users would have difficulty in building into and enabling in Nvu. Leave the building and tool design/installation to yourselves, and help your target audience by building link checking into the base application, something that virtually everyone has to do at some point, and at the end, of web design. Users prefer their own favorite link checking script or app? Great. Enable them to use their own favorite one. But install by default a decent link checker script or app for those of us who would have trouble doing it ourselves, and who wouldn't know about installing it, and assume that it is missing from the beginning (this is on the assumption that Nvu doesn't have this important feature to begin with).
Another very important feature that Frontpage has, and is missing from all the other tools I've seen, is the "map" of the sites being built, that show each page as a box, with lines connecting the boxes (shows positions of pages as child, parent, top, same level, etc), and where you can edit the name of the box, which changes either the title or the file name of the html file, depending on setting, and where you can also drag and drop the box, which has the effect of changing the layout of the site, allowing you to reposition the layout of page hierarchy, and which updates links on the fly, making sure that all hyperlinks, all navigation buttons are automatically updated to reflect the new hierarchy position of the particular page. This may not be so important for web sites that are a few pages in size, but for sites that start to get larger (especially as time goes on), it is important for reconfiguring the layout of the pages, keeping track of all links, and maintaining a good understanding of the layout.
The feature above is like a kvio layout, but you can drag and drop, change names of the boxes, change positions, and all the actions update all the links, all the titles, all the file names. This is a killer feature, one that makes managing sites that contain dozens to hundreds of pages very easy.
Net Objects Fusion does this<nobr> <wbr></nobr>... beautifully.
I use Quanta now and this is the SINGLE feature I actually miss.
I hate this feature of Frontpage, though I have never used it. I hate it because you can only keep that navigation consistent when moving pages to another site by doing an export/import. Frontpage will NOT (I repeat, NOT) rebuild these navigations from scratch given a bunch of files, even if created with Frontpage.
I know this because I'm the webmaster for a community college. The faculty all thought they were cool by creating tons of pages on an external Frontpage-enabled site. When that site crashed without backups, most of them had copies of the HTML files. But they couldn't recreate the navigation. And without the navigation, they didn't understand how to link their pages together. They couldn't believe it when I told them that the links inside the page actually control what the page links to...
From what I've seen, not only is this feature available only in Frontpage, but also requires a Frontpage-enabled server...
For CSS, I use a great tool called TopStyle under both OSes.
If you need to make some serious websites, Frontpage is the absolute worst choice as it screws up the HTML.
As a check for how my pages display, I use Mozilla, Firefox and IE. Any code that doesn't work the same in all 3 is automatically discarded by me as non-standard and therefor not acceptable.
The main feature that keeps me using DreamweaverMX is the help it provides in maintaining the links accross big sites - move files and your links in the whole site will be updated. Great stuff.
Hello, I am Daniel Glazman, Nvu's lead engineer, and I have a few quite important comments to make about your review of Nvu.
- you said you tested a v0.1. We never released 0.1. The first public release was 0.15, and we released 0.20 a couple of weeks ago... 0.20 has very significant improvements compared to 0.15. You'll find a complete description of features <A HREF="http://glazman.org/whyNvu/index.html" TITLE="glazman.org">here</a glazman.org>, and the changelog <A HREF="http://glazman.org/whyNvu/nvu.html" TITLE="glazman.org">here</a glazman.org>.
- in particular, templates management is in 0.20... Too bad you tested a 0.15.
- about graphics, you are right saying that FrontPage takes advantage of the whole Windows underlying API, a lot of graphics functions behind directly integrated to the OS. Given the cross-platform state of Nvu, we can't do that and it's very unlikely that Nvu will integrate an image editor. Nvu is not intended to become a new gigantic-does-everything-but-your-coffee piece of software.
- your article does not mention standards compliance. Nvu produces a much better markup than FrontPage and integrates a very good CSS editor. The quality of the markup lets authors be sure their pages will be maintainable, and that the number of cross-browser issues is minimal.
- Nvu 0.20 preserves PHP <?php<nobr> <wbr></nobr>... ?>pseudo-processing instructions.
- as you said, Nvu is a work in progress. We are working on exciting new features, and even if you plan to keep FrontPage two more years, I think you'll be able to trash it quite soon... Stay tuned:-)
- for those interested, Nvu will be present at the <A HREF="http://www.desktoplinuxsummit.org/" TITLE="desktoplinuxsummit.org">Desktop Linux Summit in San Diego</a desktoplinuxsummit.org> at the end of the month
Daniel Glazman
Thanks for taking the time to reply. The reason I tested 0.15 rather than<nobr> <wbr></nobr>.20 is simple. I always take the time to use a software package for at least several days before offering my opinion on it. Or at least any part of it above and beyond the installation utility.
I listed the version I tested as 0.1 rather than 0.15 simply because I personally don't pay much attention to version changes past the 0.0 mark. Perhaps I should, but to me the differences between (for example) versions 1.44, 1.45, 1.46 and 1.47 generally tend to be too small for a non-programmer like me to detect. I am glad to see that your project is advancing at a good pace and I look forward to getting my hands on an updated copy of Nvu in the near future.
Regards,
Barry Smith
(CC'd to daniel@glazman.org)
Daniel,
It's nice to see you posting in the forum. I'm still waiting for an answer to my question (in an above comment): HOW IN THE HELL DOES ONE INSTALL Nvu??? I would really like to try it out someday.
Thank you.
In your response to his review you stated:
"you said you tested a v0.1. We never released 0.1. The first public release was 0.15, and we released 0.20 a couple of weeks ago<nobr> <wbr></nobr>..."
This contradicts:
"Nvu 0.1 binary test builds are now available for Linux and Windows. The source code of Nvu will be released when we reach a more complete product in terms of features. The code will be tri-licensed MPL/GPL/LGPL and we'll contribute it back to Mozilla.org at that time."
from your own web site. I think it is entirely reasonable for Barry to have assumed he had a copy of 0.1 in his possession. Don't you?
The more competition, the better.
Bluefish? Hello? Are you there?
I would have been perfectly willing to evaluate an updated version of FrontPage, however Microsoft has not seen fit to provide an evaluation copy for me to test. Most of the software review articles that I write are based on either a package that I already own, or a package that has been provided for the purpose of evaluation. If I had to buy my own evaluation releases out of my own pocket at full retail, I would probably put out one, perhaps two articles a year. Software, especially proprietary software, can get expensive real fast.
I was aiming for a real world test of programs under the circumstances that I, and some other SOHO writers, actually work in. In practical real world terms, I have no intention of purchasing upgrades to my current version of MS Office for the forseeable future. For my purposes the cost is not worth the potential benefit.
Why should I spend an unholy amount of my own money to upgrade a proprietary package when I can (eventually) obtain an OSS equivalent for free? And based on what I am reading in industry related surveys, I am far from the only SOHO operator who has declined to embrace the newer versions of Microsoft's offering.
I use FrontPage now for the same reason that I once used MS Windows - because I have no choice in the matter. For now.
Can't read, need to enable cookies!
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on April 07, 2004 10:13 PMThe user has control!
My visits to NewsForge has slowed down with the "new" format. It will cease if cookies are required.
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