HTML Learning Tools from Mozilla

The Mozilla Foundation has setup its Webmaker site to help folks learn how to code HTML.

The site includes:

• Thimble is an online HTML editor you can use to create web pages. It is a simple split pane with your HTML code on the left and the resulting output on the right. You can publish the page to the Webmaker site so it can share it with others. The site includes a number of projects designed to get your started learning.


• X-Ray Goggles is a tool for exploring the code on a web page.


• Popcorn is a tool for creating Video

All the tools are online which is pretty cool. The site could use a starter video or project that gets really basic. From my experience, you can't just throw tags at folks and expect them to "get it". But I would definitely give the Mozilla Foundation and A for effort.



The Register has a detailed review here.

Mozilla Mobile Operating System

I missed this while I was running a beta teach last week. The Mozilla Foundation is working on a open source standards based mobile operating system. They offered free sample phones to developers at the JSConf in Scottsdale, AZ.



All apps are built using HTML5 and CSS3. This could be very interesting if the project continues to gain some momentum. Articles follow.



TechCrunch: Free Gecko Smartphone at JSConf

Applico: Mozilla Mobile Operating System Sneak Peak

Mozilla Boot to Gecko Announcement

The Latest on Mozilla Firefox

CNET has a nice write up on what's going on with the Mozilla foundation and Firefox.



CNET: Mozilla is more than just Firefox



Sometimes I think people forget the importance of open source software and affect on the growth of the Internet. I regularly use Firefox, Chrome, and Safari and still find Firefox the best of the bunch.

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.