Showing posts with label web authoring. Show all posts
Showing posts with label web authoring. Show all posts

25 June 2009

Authoring Beautiful HTML...

...ain't easy in the open source world, as David Ascher points out in this post:

However, for regular folks, life is not rosy yet in the Open Web world. Authoring beautiful HTML is, even with design and graphics talent, still way, way too hard. I’m writing this using Wordpress 2.8, which has probably some of the best user experience for simple HTML authoring. As Matt Mullenweg (the founder of Wordpress) says, it’s still not good enough. As far as I can tell, there are currently no truly modern, easy to use, open source HTML composition tools that we could use in Thunderbird for example to give people who want to design wholly original, designed email messages. That’s a minor problem in the world of email, which is primarily about function, not form, and I think we’ll be able to go pretty far with templates, but it’s a big problem for making design on the web more approachable.

There are some valiant efforts to clean up the old, crufty, scary composer codebase that Mozilla has relied on for years. There are simple blog-style editors like FCKEditor and its successor CKEditor. There are in-the-browser composition tools like Google Pages or Google Docs, but those are only for use by Google apps, and only work well when they limit the scope of the design space substantially (again, a rational choice). None of these can provide the flexibility that Ventura Publisher or PageMaker had in the dark ages; none of them can compete from a learnability point of view with the authoring tools that rely on closed stacks; none of them allow the essential polish that hand-crafted code can yield. That’s a gap, and an opportunity.

Let's hope people in the free software world seize it.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

01 October 2007

KompoZer: Recomposing Nvu

One of the critical apps in any software ecosystem is a web authoring system. Until recently, the main free software offering was Nvu, but things had gone rather quiet on this front. With the launch of KompoZer, "Nvu's unofficial bug-fix release", we find out why:

Why call it «KompoZer» instead of «Nvu»? Because « Nvu and the Nvu logo are trademarks of Linspire Inc. » As Linspire stopped the development of Nvu, there is no legal way to correct any bug in Nvu.
God bless forks. Let's hope this time the project receives enough support from the community to join the open source pantheon of serious apps. (Via Linux.com.)