A colleague dropped by and bragged that he’d heard from a student in college. “Yeah, she made an ‘A’ in her project because she could create a web page!” I laughed and said, “Didn’t you teach her using Notepad on Windows?”
“You bet, that’s all we had!” he laughed back, his blue eyes open wide. “And one of your people just told me about NVU!”

Tonight, I went looking for NVU because I’m participating in an online course, and wanted to develop nicely formatted discussion forum posts (no, they’re not using Moodle). I stumbled across this entry at Wikipedia:

Nvu (pronounced “N-view”) is a discontinued WYSIWYG HTML editor, based on the Composer component of Mozilla Application Suite and Gecko 1.7. It is a common WYSIWYG editor for Linux and is intended to be an open source equivalent to proprietary software like Microsoft Expression Web and Adobe Dreamweaver (although to date it is missing many features they possess). As a WYSIWYG editor, it is designed to be easy for novice users and does not require any knowledge of HTML or CSS to use.

Though I was disappointed, I realized I could still download it…and then I read this:

A community-driven WYSIWYG HTML editor fork, KompoZer, maintains Nvu codebase and fixes bugs until a successor to Nvu is released.

I went to the web site for KompoZer and…

KompoZer is a complete web authoring system that combines web file management and easy-to-use WYSIWYG web page editing. KompoZer is designed to be extremely easy to use, making it ideal for non-technical computer users who want to create an attractive, professional-looking web site without needing to know HTML or web coding.

Now, I can easily get Macromedia/Adobe Dreamweaver to use or use any variety of tools to get the job done. But I thought it quaint that an HTML editor is still available at no charge. Isn’t that awesome?

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