Kompozer web authoring software

Kompozer WYSIWYG : Introduction

For a while now, web developers advocates have no choice but to use commercial WYSIWYG(What You See Is What You Get) HTML editors. There are no free (as in free speech) WYSIWYG software that the budget conscious web developer can use. That is until NVU, pronounced as new view, came into play. There was a lot of buzz and hoopla going on about what seems to be a promising project. But eventually, the main developers have given up the project and moved on to better things. Fortunately, a few NVU users have taken up the bastion and created their own project based on the NVU source code called Kompozer.

While we never had any need to use a WYSIWYG editor and we prefer to build websites by hand, we acknowledge that a lot of web developers still rely on these types of software and are often on the lookout for free alternatives. Although there are now a lot of free WYSIWYG open source editors around, NVU (and Kompozer) is definitely one of the oldest, and being the first review for such software, I feel it is appropriate to look at this software first. Kompozer also works with a variety of platforms including Mac, Windows, and Linux. For the purpose of this test we will be using Fedora 12, our favorite Linux flavor here at the studio.

First Impressions

When opening up Kompozer, the first thing you will noticed is that it looks very familiar. It looks like Firefox. In fact, it is built on the same technologies that powers firefox. The GUI is clean, and every button seems straightforward. This sounds like a good thing right? Well, we will soon find out.

Working with Kompozer

Kompozer is very easy to use. There is a button to help you create tables, forms, and lists. If you are into websites using table layouts, you will find that Kompozer works very well with tables. But it is very hard to work with DIVs. No matter how hard I tried, there is no easy way to work with DIVs using only the WSIWYG portion of the software. The automated forms creation is also a handy feature that works well with the software, very straight forward and self explanatory.

One of the most useful feature i found in Konqueror is the CSS support. It lets you create and edit style-sheets easily. It is very easy to use, and a boon to web developers and particularly students who are still getting familiar with CSS.

Other features are pretty basic, although easy to use. Text alignment, font styles, adding images, and pretty much about anything you need to create simple websites are supported. An added bonus is a built-in spell checker; useful for all the dyslexics out there.

A w3c validation service is also included, a feature the obsessive-compulsive among web developers will love, but then again, those of us that falls under this category would rather build websites by hand.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, Konqueror is definitely not the most sophisticated of WYSIWYG editors. In fact, it is a very basic software when compared to its commercial competitors. Creating simple web-pages is a straightforward task, but those who needs more complex layouts will have to look somewhere else as the software seems to have trouble when working with DIVs. The w3c validation service is a nice touch.

Although we cannot recommend this software for any serious website developer to create websites, it is a good tool for newbies and non-professionals because it is very easy to use. Its CSS editor also did well more than expected.

For those who just needs a CSS editor, then Kompozer might be a good tool for you. In my opinion, this is the strongest point of the software. I would go out on a lib and recommend this software as a good CSS editing tool, but I could not see Kompozer as something spectacular as far as real-time HTML editing is concerned.

The software is still in active development, although development has seen little feature additions since the initial realease.