Nvu 1.0 review

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Nvu is the new Web editing environment based on the Mozilla platform and its Gecko layout engine. Primarily made for Linspire and ot

License: MPL (Mozilla Public License)
File size: 0K
Developer: Linspire, Inc.
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Nvu is the new Web editing environment based on the Mozilla platform and its Gecko layout engine.

Primarily made for Linspire and other Linux flavors, its cross-platform architecture makes it available on a wide variety of other platforms.

Nvu is based on Gecko , the layout engine inside Mozilla ; it's a super-fast, very reliable, standards conformant engine maintained on a daily basis by a wide community of developers. Its remarkable support of XML, CSS and JavaScript offers the best authoring platform on the market. Its architecture based on XUL makes it the most extensible editing tool ever.

Here are some key features of "Nvu":
FTP site manager

With Nvu, all the sites you have specified in your Publishing Settings become browseable in a sidebar. You can get a tree view of a site, ? la Explorer's folders pane, or a one-dir-only view, ? la Explorer's directory view. It is also possible to filter files and show all files, or only HTML documents or image files. The browsing area also allows to show for each file its size and the date of last modification.

In the near future, one will be able to remove a file, create a new directory or remove an existing directory.

A new color picker

Composer was far behind other HTML editors and offered only a very basic color picker. Nvu has a new extended colorpicker, more conformant to what KDE users are used to. Set a color from its red blue and green components, or its hue saturation and brightness. Or just use your mouse to pick up the color you want.

Tabs!

One of Mozilla Firefox's killer features is now available in Nvu! Have one window only on your screen and edit several documents at once, each document having its own Undo/Redo stack! Just glance at the tabs to know if a document needs to be saved or not! Use it, and you'll never want an editor without tabs again.

CSS editor

CaScadeS, the well-known CSS editor add-on to Mozilla Composer, is integrated into Nvu. Create stylesheets easily and manage the styles attached to your documents. Full-powered by Gecko, of course, you can see your style settings applied '"live" to the document you're editing.

A dash of style(s)

CaScadeS, the CSS editor, was designed to allow inline styling of arbitrary elements without having to create a stylesheet. With Nvu, right-click on any element in the hierarchical toolbar at the bottom of the window and set directly its style properties.

For the time being, only font and border properties are available that way, but we'll extend that first set to all the CSS properties known by CaScadeS in the near future.

Customizable toolbars

Never argue again in Bugzilla in favor or against new toolbar buttons in Composer because there is or there is no room left in the toolbar! Just customize your toolbar and show only the buttons you want/need. And if you really want more buttons than your screen's width can contain, just create a new toolbar.

Toolbar buttons

Speaking of customizable toolbars, two new buttons for and are available.. A new font-family dropdown menu, similar to the Format > Font menu, is also available for toolbars.

Of course, it is easily extensible and in the future you'll be able to create your own buttons.

Forms

Do we need to say more? Yes, forms, finally!

Take advantage from a XUL-based UI to edit all your forms, and edit all your form elements.

Cleaner markup

That's only a beginning but Nvu contains some machinery to get rid of most of those annoying < br > we used to see in Composer. Combined with the ability to call W3C's HTML validator from within Nvu - and in the future to call to W3C's CSS validator - you'll make valid, clean documents. And to be sure about it, we will integrate a real markup cleaner to Nvu in the near future.

XFN

When you create a new link to an external resource, or when you edit an existing link, you can now add XHTML Friends Network information to say that the owner of that resource is someone you know and trust.

Visible marks

In a complex page layout, you often need to see visible carriage returns and block borders. Nvu can now do that for you.

And of course, everything is controlled by a CSS stylesheet so you can customize those marks and replace them by your own.

Table/Cell resizing rulers

On the left and top side of the opened tab you will find the convenient table resizing rulers which will help you easily adjust the size of rows and columns in any table in the web page you design.

Automated Spellchecker

The integrated in-line spellchecker will underline all misspelled words as you type to ensure correct spelling throughout the entire web page.

Requirements:
gecko-sdk

What's New in This Release:
First stable, feature-complete version. Enjoy!

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