Dreamweaver and Frontpage are no doubt the most popular WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) HTML editors but carry a pretty large pricetag, with Dreamweaver costing about £500! Naturally, neither work under Linux either! KompoZer is a free, open-source and cross-platform WYSIWYG editor which should fill the needs of any home user.
Whilst KompoZer has not been updated since 2007, the major mark-up languages haven’t changed since then so it should still work. KompoZer is based on Gecko, the rendering engine which Mozilla amongst others utilise, and is a fork of Nvu (another WYSIWYG editor which is now not developed), itself a fork of Mozilla Composer!
KompoZer has all the obvious features of a WYSIWYG web editor: HTML and CSS can be edited; FTP support; tables; and tabs to navigate between pages and views. Some nicer features include an integrated W3 validator and support for XFN.
Binaries are available for Win32, PPC Macs (which will run on Intel-based ones) and Linux. Source is also available so it can be compiled for other operating systems.
Like Nvu, the application can be used from a USB pen.
I personally use KompoZer if I quickly need to whip up a webpage and I don’t have the patience to code it in Textmate. It’s certainly usable, produces relatively clean code and it’s £500 cheaper than Dreamweaver!
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Thanks Joe for this lead. I have read the website but i am new to Linux so i have a question for you, can i use this software with main SUSE Linux Enterprise Linux? And if so do i have to load the version gcc4.0.3 tarball ?
I use it with Windows, but run into some issue (I don’t remember now, which), and moved to NVU. That wasn’t perfect too, sometimes it crashes, but it does what I want – simple HTML help pages.