NVu 1.0 HTML Editor Review

I've been coding HTML since 1996. Now years later when the technology is so much better I find that I can use a WYSIWYG editor like NVu, which is based on the old Netscape Composer from 1996. And if I the editor creates extra markup then I can go underneath and delete the extraneous crap.

What I like in NVu is that it has a great table editor. So if you want to tweak a table you don't have to go searching through all those elements to find the right one to edit. Also if you want to right align a whole bunch of cells, all you have to do is select a range and push the right align button on the main button bar.

But there are things that are broken in NVu that need fixing and some in the NVu community wonder why they are not being fixed. For example since version 0.80 the ToC function works initially, but when you want to delete the ToC or select "Update" it won't delete the "MoZToC" code scattered throughout the document. And if you really screw around with trying to delete it, NVu will literally erase your document up till the last Save, and only keep the portions that are new. So always keep a separate copy of your document in another directory before testing this feature.

The other thing is that NVu behaves just like most other WYSIWYG editors in that it adds extraneous HTML code in places that you don't need them. For example when I was working on a table recently, it added style="align="undefined" in more than a few cells, therefore adding to the download time for slow Internet connections.

If the authors of NVu can fix these errors then it can creae a really nice HTML editor for those who don't want to learn the underlings of the markup language.

Creating SGML CALS Tables in WordPerfect

I've been experimenting with creating tables using the CALS Table Model as HTML for about a month now.

Since the DocBook CALS Table Model is basically the same, except for a few things like in DocBook rows start off with a element and cells are referenced by an element, they're basically identical.

So I tried this in WordPerfect's SGML editor, and it didn't do a thing, until I came back the next day after closing down the program. However it started the table on the next page, instead of the current one.

When you have WordPerfect's SGML editor in Table mode, there is a toolbar that helps in formatting and styling cells.

I need to experiment more before I were to put up a better document on how to do this on my SGML/XML page.

— not rendering in Konquerer

The mdash entity symbol doesn't render in Konquerer, but does in all other browsers. Instead it outputs a hollow square box.