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Nvu (pronounced "N-view" is a WYSIWYG HTML editor, based on the Composer component of Mozilla Application Suite and Gecko 1.7. It is intended to be an open source equivalent to proprietary software like Microsoft FrontPage and Macromedia Dreamweaver and is one of the primary WYSIWYG editors for Linux. Nvu is designed to be easy for non-technical computer users. Knowledge of HTML or CSS is not required.

The project was started by and is sponsored by Linspire. Linspire hired Daniel Glazman, former Netscape Communications Corporation employee and CEO/Founder of [http://disruptive-innovations.com/ Disruptive Innovations], to be lead developer.

Nvu is available for Linux, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows, although it can be built successfully on any platform with the Netscape Portable Runtime.

Nvu may sometimes be spelled "N|vu" to simulate the line in the logo, much like CNET is often written as "C|Net".

An interesting part of NVU is the integrated CSS editor.

Development


The original plan in June 2005 was to merge back the numerous changes into Mozilla Composer's source code tree. Since then the Mozilla Suite has been discontinued (then reintroduced as SeaMonkey), and no one merged the Nvu code back into Composer.

Daniel Glazman announced on September 15, 2006 that he has stopped official development on Nvu and he is developing a successor to it, tentatively called Composer (or Mozilla Composer 2.0), as a Mozilla.org project. It is written from scratch and based on Mozilla trunk Gecko 1.9 and XULRunner. PHP and CSS will be supported. A community-driven fork, KompoZer, maintains Nvu codebase and fixes bugs until a successor to Nvu is released.

Standards compliance


Nvu complies strictly to the W3C's web standards. By default pages are created in accordance to HTML 4.01 Transitional and use CSS for styling, but the user can change the settings and choose between:
* Strict and transitional DTD's
* HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0
* CSS styling or the old <font> based styling.

The application includes a built-in HTML validator, which uploads pages to the W3C's HTML Validator and checks for compliance. Some have complained that this validator has a bug that breaks IFRAME's SRC attribute by adding an extra ".htm" to the end of it.

Release history


* 0.1 was released on February 4, 2004
* 0.20 was released on March 25, 2004
* 0.3 was released on June 11, 2004
* 0.4 was released on August 10, 2004
* 0.5 was released on October 6, 2004
* 0.6 (1.0b) was pre-released on November 26, 2004
* 0.7 (1.0b2) was pre-released on January 6, 2005
* 0.8 (1.0b3) was pre-released on February 2, 2005
* 0.81 was pre-released on February 9, 2005
* 0.90RC1 was released on March 4, 2005
* 0.90 was released on March 11, 2005
* 1.0PR was released on April 5, 2005
* 1.0 was released on June 29, 2005
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