<Glazblog/>

NVU 1.0 Preview Release!!!

People, I am immensely happy to announce the immediate availability of Nvu 1.0 Preview Release from its official web site http://www.nvu.com or the official mirror below. Linspire 5.0 users should download it through CNR. This is the very first release in the History of the Mozilla editor to be able to natively edit XHTML1 Strict documents. It also includes a direct link to a contributed User Guide, thanks to Charles Cooke's excellent work.

It's also the first time we release an Nvu milestone simultaneously in several languages: Dutch, English, French and Russian. Many thanks to Gert-Paul van der Beek, Flore Allemandou, Sébastien Desvignes and Alexey Gubanov who made it possible. Wait, why 4 languages only??? Because it was a first test, we needed to know if we can handle this sort of things. Now we know! And we hope to have much more locales ready for 1.0final :-)

Changelog:

  • Connection settings were not saving proxy ports.
  • changes in About dialog.
  • Inline Spell Checker enabled by default.
  • new dialog allowing to disable the Inline Spell Checker when the user switches from Source mode to another Normal/AllTags/Preview.
  • added Charles Cooke's User Guide in Help menu.
  • copy and paste in the source view fixed
  • support for HTML 4.01 Strict and Transitional, XHTML 1.0 Strict and Transitional
    • new persistent checkboxes in File > New dialog
    • new prefs in Tools > Preferences > New Page Settings
    • prefs is always honoured, including launch time for the first created blank document
    • UI elements not allowed by the DTD of the current document are disabled
  • new Help contents, contributed by KDS Sahambi
  • small toolbar icons by default
  • Font Face dropdown menu moved to second format toolbar to keep a compact window
  • PHP and comments now hidden when located between table cells/rows/etc, ie in places where visibility would break the table layout.
  • it was impossible to remove a form element from the Form dialog.
  • on linux, dropping a file on the source view inserted an image or a link in the source
  • default theme's icon and preview were not displayed
  • it was impossible to revert to default theme
  • fixed 0.90 regression from 0.81: it was impossible to launch nvu <url>
  • a lot of minor bug fixes

Known problems

  • in XHTML documents, Nvu 1.0PR serializes empty script (for external scripts) in the form <script src="..." /> with no end tag. This is perfectly valid XML, of course, but an old piece of crap a browser called MSIE chokes on it, of course. To avoid that, tweak those elements in the source view to give them a content, for exemple a whitespace char.

windows build  Official Windows installer (1.0PR)

windows build  Official Windows tarball (1.0PR, zip)

L50 build  Official Linspire 5.0 tarball (1.0PR, Linspire 5.0 (Marlin 4.9.448), gcc 3.3.5, gtk2, xft)

linux build  Official Linux 2.6.10 tarball (1.0PR, Linspire 5.0 (Marlin 4.9.448), gcc 3.3.5, gtk2, xft)

F3 build  Official Fedora3 tarball (1.0PR, Fedora3, KDE)

mac build  Official Mac OS X disk image (1.0PR)

sources  Official source tarball (1.0PR)

Comments

1. On Thursday 14 April 2005, 10:12 by Drasa

Yattaaaa! Thanks! I appreciate your work!

2. On Thursday 14 April 2005, 10:15 by Normand Lamoureux

A great news. Really. Thanks a lot, Daniel. I will be proud to announce it to my French blog readers.

3. On Thursday 14 April 2005, 10:33 by Will Rickards

About dialog is too big and seems to have two copies (one incomplete) of the nvu logo.

4. On Thursday 14 April 2005, 10:35 by Mitternacht

Ben là... merci, bravo, et toute cette sorte de choses. Comme dirait Willow, "tu es un grand guerrier".

5. On Thursday 14 April 2005, 10:45 by john

yes!

6. On Thursday 14 April 2005, 10:49 by Tene

Finally :D fits in with XP/2003 themes.

How about getting rid of menu shadows when they are disabled for XP (the Smoke theme does it ... for some strange reason).

7. On Thursday 14 April 2005, 10:56 by jilles

Nice but still quite a few bugs:
- cursor positioning. type text, select h1, enter, type more text watch the cursor jump as soon as you start typing
- saving. switch to the source mode, ctrl+s -> nvu switches to the normal mode
- I can "paste without formatting" but not "paste"??
- "view carriage returns" doesn't seem to work
- sometimes a thin black vertical line of about the size of a cursor is visible in the normal mode, it won't go away until the screen is redrawn.
- delete does not always work as expected (type text, two newlines, more text, h1, arrow up, delete -> the H1 won't move up as expected)
- backspace does not work as expected (same example as delete, move down so the cursor is at the beginning of the H1 line, backspace -> the text moves up but the H1 markup is gone)

I know you really want to finish NVU but IMHO it this is nothing more than a beta that still needs a lot of work & polishing. You seem to have the feature development wrapped up. but polishing this into a high quality product will take several months at least.

8. On Thursday 14 April 2005, 11:23 by Cheeks

Congratulations! I look forward to trying it out!

9. On Thursday 14 April 2005, 11:40 by Fred.cpp

Also I hope Localizations are ready, At the "Proyecto NAVE" page here: nave.escomposlinux.org/pr... you can see the progress for the Spanish translation (es-ES). Unfortunally some lack of support somewhere is slowing down the process and The kind people at the Nave project Is making It possible. Anyway we hope to be ready for 1.0

10. On Thursday 14 April 2005, 12:53 by Davide Baroncelli

Firefox...Thunderbird... NVU?!?!? Is that really the best you could come out with!!??

11. On Thursday 14 April 2005, 12:53 by Davide Baroncelli

(I'm talking about the crappy name, of course)

12. On Thursday 14 April 2005, 13:39 by bdeonline

Everything looks great even the php is working great the only issue I dont like is the huge amout of breaks for each attribute.

<table align="center" border="0"
cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="749">

The create form isn't working and when I add a submit button it give me:
<button value="test" name="test" />

I know this is just a RC just wanted to be aware of these issues.

13. On Thursday 14 April 2005, 15:24 by DJGM

Why are options greyed out, such as changing background images on the fly?

14. On Thursday 14 April 2005, 15:37 by composer

Congratulations!
and Very very very big Thanks...

It'a happy day; very very happy day...

I'm siiiingin' in the Raaaaiiiin...

:) :) :) :) :)

15. On Thursday 14 April 2005, 19:05 by Eduardo

Is there any translation effort to pt-br?

16. On Friday 15 April 2005, 01:47 by Kaze

Great, great, great. Gotta test with my PHP templates ;-)

About locales: it seems that extensions are always installed with the first available language (English most of the time).
Try with Launchy or NsmConText (french page here: fabiwan.kenobi.free.fr/Nv... on a french version, you'll get an english extension, though french locales are available.
I tested with the 1.0PR french zip version, but the problem is the same with older releases.

Is that a "officially" known problem ?

17. On Friday 15 April 2005, 02:13 by Eccentricgnat

Using Suse Linux 9.2

I am trying to set the wrap of this picture to the "right" which will make the text wrap around to the right of the picture.
However, no matter how I do it, it keeps just setting it to the bottom of the picture, it will not set it to wrap. If I enter it by hand in the html source mode such as align="right" it will work and wrap the text to the picture. I didn't have this problem with NVU until this version.

18. On Friday 15 April 2005, 05:42 by Shoshannah Forbes

Great to see that the most annoying bug in 0.9 (going back to html4 instead of xhtml for the initial page) is fixed!

However, there seems to be a new bug, at least on Windows (haven't checked the mac version yet):
In the prefrences, new page settings- the dialog box is cut just after the "Language" selection, so there is no way to set the default encoding for new documents.

Hope that you will fix that soon :-)

19. On Friday 15 April 2005, 09:02 by Klint

Excellent work, thanks a lot.
hummm, just one little thing : I cannot open the properties window for a "select" field in a form !!!

20. On Friday 15 April 2005, 11:52 by Philippe Worontzoff

"in XHTML documents, Nvu 1.0PR serializes empty script (for external scripts) in the form <script src="..." /> with no end tag. This is perfectly valid XML, of course, but a browser called MSIE chokes on it, of course."

MSIE respect the specs... The script element is not empty : www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-modul...
So, I don't know for XML, but, in XHTML, <script /> is not valid.

21. On Friday 15 April 2005, 17:07 by J.B. Nicholson-Owens

[Either the preview is broken on this blog, or there appears to be no way to see paragraphs in preview mode. Please forgive the lack of paragraphs in my post if there aren't any.]

I tried the program on Fedora Core 3 GNU/Linux (i386).

One of Jilles' bugs I could not reproduce:

"- cursor positioning. type text, select h1, enter, type more text watch the cursor jump as soon as you start typing"

I notice no cursor jump, but I do see a delay for drawing the new height of the box on the left of the window that measures the height of the box you're in. This is hardly a showstopper, however.

Some bugs need more information to be easily reproducible:

"- I can "paste without formatting" but not "paste"??"

Paste and paste without formatting are both available for me and they work as I expect (reproducing formatting and not, respectively). Is there a test case that illustrates the problem you're seeing?

"- sometimes a thin black vertical line of about the size of a cursor is visible in the normal mode, it won't go away until the screen is redrawn."

It would help if there were a test case to make this happen. I've seen this in a variety of programs on a variety of OSes but I can't nail down what I did to see it.

"- "view carriage returns" doesn't seem to work"

I don't know what this function is supposed to do, nor do I know how to enter a carriage return. Is this just by hitting return (so we're seeing the <br /> elements?) or is there something else? If it's just about seeing the <br /> elements, I can duplicate this and confirm this is broken.

One problem I could duplicate and it seems significant:

"- backspace does not work as expected (same example as delete, move down so the cursor is at the beginning of the H1 line, backspace -> the text moves up but the H1 markup is gone)"

This is reproducible and major as it causes dataloss and fails to support reasonable expectations for editing.

And one problem is reproducible but merely annoying:

"- saving. switch to the source mode, ctrl+s -> nvu switches to the normal mode"

"- delete does not always work as expected (type text, two newlines, more text, h1, arrow up, delete -> the H1 won't move up as expected)"

I don't have enough experience with webpage editors to weigh Nvu against others; I write webpages in a text editor and have no real need for a GUI webpage editor. I appreciate that Nvu is free software (not that Nvu is alone in this), however.

It seems to me like only one of these bugs is a genuine problem that could throw users off enough to not trust the program to do the right thing. The other bugs range from annoyances to needing more information before confirming there is a problem. Other bugs I've noticed appear to be inherited from other Mozilla programs (the customize toolbar panel is incorrectly formatted for large text users; it resizes itself when you drag something out of it to place on the toolbar, which is annoying; it is animated when opening which is silly and out of step with the rest of the app).

22. On Saturday 16 April 2005, 11:56 by Karl

Great, Nvu is quite good, btw we can thanks mr Strba for his nice FC3 packages, they works fine :)
I think that Nvu lacks only one feature but i think that an extension will perfectly fit that need :)

23. On Sunday 17 April 2005, 07:43 by Jeff Imig

Very good work, Nvu!

24. On Sunday 17 April 2005, 16:59 by Benjamin Huot

Good job. Thanks for the Mac version. One problem in this version (Mac port) is in the preferences dialog that the options overflow the window and are chopped off where the window ends. Is there any way to fix this before 1.0 final?

25. On Monday 18 April 2005, 02:13 by Erwin

Looks great, although the bug mentioned above with the align-options for images is quite annoying. Adding the align-option to the advanced settings for an image doesn't work either, all you can do is edit the source. I really hope this will be fixed in the final release.

26. On Monday 18 April 2005, 11:59 by Jilles van Gurp

J.B. Nicholson-Owens, I don't agree with your comments on quality. IMHO NVU in this state is usable like mozilla 0.6 was a usable browser, like firefox 0.5 was usable. It's a very usable product but it lacks the quality it's mozilla cousins had when they reached 1.0. It seems to me NVU is being rushed to meet deadlines rather than properly finished. Don't get me wrong, I think it is amazing how much Daniel has achieved in such a short period of time but I do think this criticism is justified. What Daniel (or linspire) choose to do with it is of course their business.

As for the non reproducable bugs: I couldn't reproduce the pasting bug myself just now but it was definately there when I saw it. Probably this requires a very specific sequence of events to happen. The cursor positioning bug is very reproducable. After you hit enter after a H1, the cursor is a few pixels lower than where it is as soon as you start typing. The black line is a little unpredictable but I see it so often that others must be seeing this as well. Probably a rendering bug.

You are right that none of this is fatal, just annoying. These bugs are what I noticed in the first five minutes of using this nvu build. I'm sure I'll find more if I spend more time with it.

They posted on the same topic

1. On Thursday 14 April 2005, 10:25 by Au delà des étoiles

Nvu 1.0PR... en anglais, français, néerlandais et russe.

Nvu 1.0 PR (pour Pre Release), le logiciel de création de pages HTML fait par Daniel Glazman et sponsorisé par Linspire Inc. sort simultanément en 4 langues : anglais (sa langue naturelle), français (par Sébastien Desvignes, Cédric, Corazza et moi et...

2. On Thursday 14 April 2005, 11:44 by WinLibre News

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3. On Thursday 14 April 2005, 20:42 by Robert Accettura's Fun With Wordage

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Glazou needs some credit on his accomplishment for a 1.0 PR release. It looked pretty solid on the Mac. The one thing I noted was the prefs window appeared slightly to small (horizontally) cutting off a few things, and the same for the "ping us so we...

4. On Friday 15 April 2005, 01:41 by Rick's HideOut

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