Nvu

» see nvu.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

I missed Nvu, and the reason is dull. By 2005 I had been writing HTML by hand long enough that a WYSIWYG editor felt like a step backwards, and the machine I wrote it on ran Windows anyway. Nvu was built for a specific person who was not me: somebody who had just moved to desktop Linux and discovered that the program they had always made web pages with did not come along.

That person was, very precisely, a Linspire customer. Nvu was the idea of Kevin Carmony, Linspire's CEO, who wanted a WYSIWYG HTML editor for Linux users and decided to fund one rather than wait for one to appear. Linspire hired Daniel Glazman, formerly of Netscape, to lead it, working through his own firm Disruptive Innovations alongside the Mozdev Group. The base was Mozilla Composer, the editor that shipped inside the Mozilla Application Suite, which had itself come down from Netscape Composer. Nvu is the third generation of the same code, and by the time it arrived the browser it had originally been a menu item inside was already gone.

It shipped fast. Version 0.1 landed on 4 February 2004 and 1.0 arrived seventeen months later, dated 28 June 2005 in Wikipedia's release history and 29 June in Linux.com's report of the press release. Carmony's line in that release was that Linux needed a viable web authoring program and that Nvu was a powerful alternative for FrontPage and Dreamweaver users who had migrated to desktop Linux. Fifteen months after 1.0, on 15 September 2006, Glazman announced that official development had stopped and that the plan now was a successor written from scratch.

~ the case file ~

~ what linspire wanted ~

The thing Nvu got right, and the reason people who used it still speak well of it, is that it took standards seriously at a moment when its commercial competitors did not have to. Pages came out as HTML 4.01 Transitional by default with CSS doing the styling, and you could switch the document type to strict, or to XHTML 1.0, or back to the old font-tag approach if you had to maintain something built that way. There was a validator button that uploaded the page to the W3C's own service and brought the result back. Glazman later co-chaired the CSS working group, and you can see the sensibility in the product.

The original plan announced in June 2005 was to merge the whole pile of changes back into Mozilla Composer's source tree. Nobody ever did it. The Mozilla Suite was discontinued and then reintroduced as SeaMonkey with its own Composer, still descended from the pre-Nvu code, and the two branches simply never rejoined. Two editors, one ancestor, no merge.

~ the unofficial bug-fix release ~

When Glazman stepped off, a community fork picked it up. KompoZer was started by Fabien Cazenave and coordinated through SourceForge, and the honesty of its own homepage is the best thing in this grave. The banner across the top of kompozer.net in 2006 read, without any embarrassment at all, "Nvu's unofficial bug-fix release". No roadmap, no mission statement. Somebody was fixing the bugs because the person who was supposed to had left.

The archived download page from that year lists version 0.77 dated 23 July 2006, built out of the Nvu 1.0 source on the Mozilla aviary branch, with the Win32 binary compiled using VC++ on Cygwin. Further down the same list, past the Linux and Mac builds, there is an OS/2 tarball, which in mid-2006 was already an act of pure stubbornness. The stable release reached 0.7.10 in August 2007 and the last one anybody shipped was 0.8 beta 3 in February 2010, still running on Gecko 1.8.1.

~ stalled at the moment ~

In June 2011 the only regular developer left wrote that development "is stalled at the moment", which is as close to a death notice as this lineage ever produced. Glazman's promised successor, BlueGriffon, had been announced in September 2008 and written from scratch on Gecko and XULRunner, so the replacement existed before the original finished dying. KompoZer being a 32-bit application, macOS Catalina finished the job on the Mac side by simply refusing to run it.

Both domains have been through the usual afterlife. nvu.com returns a 302 over http and https alike, pointing at a listing on a domain-name marketplace, so the address of the open source FrontPage is now for sale by the letter. kompozer.net answers nothing over either scheme today, but the archive caught the intermediate stage: through 2020 and into 2022 it was a WordPress page whose images were the logos of Squarespace and Wix and every other hosted site builder, monetizing the search traffic of people still looking for a free HTML editor that stopped being released in 2010.

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