WYSIWYG Open Source HTML Editing

While working on a project this week, I needed to create a simple HTML file to store a little narrative. So, instead of doing this by hand, it seemed like a good idea to try to create the file using a WYSIWYG editor.

For the initial try, the file was created with Open Office 3.1 for the Mac. Now editing the file in Open Office, is nice and easy. Just what you would expect from a full featured word processor. However, the HTML produced from OO is less than full featured. Heavy use of font tags and such makes for a less than desirable HTML output file. Very 1990s.

So to clean up the file, I remembered that the Composer application is still included as part of the SeaMonkey Project. If you are not familiar with it, SeaMonkey is essentially the "Son of Netscape", the continuation of the classic Netscape browser. It uses the same core as the Firefox browser, but keeps the same all-in-one feature set of Netscape. I was very pleased with the HTML output of Composer. Very clean HTML. No unecessary font tags and the like. The user interface is still a bit basic, but functional.

While searching around for information on Composer, I ran across this post about Kompozer, Composer, and NVu. KompoZer is a continuation of NVu. NVu is a very simple stand alone open source HTML WYSIWYG editor made for the Linspire OS. Unforunately, for copyright reasons, it could not be updated. So the source was forked and Kompozer was born. According to the post, the KompoZer app will be updated to the latest version of Gecko and then folded back into the SeaMonkey version of Composer. Very cool. It is good to have a tool like this in the Open Source space.