Mozilla Composer is the
free and open-source
Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...
HTML editor and web authoring module of the
Mozilla Application Suite (the predecessor to
SeaMonkey). It is used to create and to edit
web pages,
e-mail, and text documents easily. It is compatible with
Windows,
macOS and
Linux. Composer is a
graphical WYSIWYG HTML editor. One also can view, write and edit
HTML source code with Composer.
[The SeaMonkey® Project](_blank)
Seamonkey-project.org. Retrieved on 2013-07-17.
In September 2008 Daniel Glazman announced a new WYSIWYG HTML editor,
BlueGriffon, written from scratch and based on Mozilla
Gecko
Geckos are small, mostly carnivorous lizards that have a wide distribution, found on every continent except Antarctica. Belonging to the infraorder Gekkota, geckos are found in warm climates throughout the world. They range from .
Geckos ar ...
and
XULRunner.
SeaMonkey, the community-driven successor to Mozilla Suite, includes an HTML editor named Composer that is developed from the Mozilla Composer code contained in the original Mozilla Suite.
Nvu
Nvu (pronounced ''"N-view"'') is a
WYSIWYG HTML editor, based on Mozilla Composer. It is intended to be an
open-source
Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...
alternative to
proprietary software like
Microsoft Expression Web and
Adobe Dreamweaver. As a WYSIWYG editor, it is designed to be easy for novice users, and does not require any knowledge of
HTML or
CSS
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML or XML (including XML dialects such as SVG, MathML or XHTML). CSS is a cornerstone techno ...
to use. It runs on
Mac OS X,
Windows and
Linux and incorporates
Cascading Style Sheets support and other improvements from software company Disruptive Innovations. Nvu was the brainchild of Kevin Carmony, CEO for
Linspire, who wanted an easy-to-use, WYSIWYG HTML editor for Linux users. Under Carmony's direction, Linspire started and sponsored Nvu, hiring
Daniel Glazman, former
Netscape Communications Corporation employee, to be the lead developer.
Development
The original plan in June 2005 was to merge back the numerous changes into Mozilla Composer's source code tree. Since then the Mozilla Suite has been discontinued (then reintroduced as
SeaMonkey), and no one has merged the Nvu code back into Composer.
Standards compliance

Nvu complies with the
W3C's web standards. By default, pages are created in accordance to HTML 4.01 Transitional and use CSS for styling, but the user can change the settings and choose between:
* Strict and transitional
DTD's
*
HTML 4.01 and
XHTML 1.0
* CSS styling or the old
<font>
based styling.
The application includes a built-in
HTML validator, which uploads pages to the
W3C's HTML Validator
The Markup Validation Service is a validator by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) that allows Internet users to check pre-HTML5 HTML and XHTML documents for Well-formed element, well-formed markup against a document type definition. Markup val ...
and checks for compliance.
Release history
* 0.1 was released on February 4, 2004
* 0.20 was released on March 25, 2004
* 0.3 was released on June 11, 2004
* 0.4 was released on August 10, 2004
* 0.5 was released on October 6, 2004
* 0.6 (1.0b) was pre-released on November 26, 2004
* 0.7 (1.0b2) was pre-released on January 6, 2005
* 0.8 (1.0b3) was pre-released on February 2, 2005
* 0.81 was pre-released on February 9, 2005
* 0.90RC1 was released on March 4, 2005
* 0.90 was released on March 11, 2005
* 1.0PR was released on April 5, 2005
* 1.0 was released on June 28, 2005
Shift to KompoZer
Daniel Glazman, the lead developer of
Nvu, announced on September 15, 2006, that he had stopped official development on Nvu and that he was developing a successor as a
Mozilla.org project. It is written from scratch and based on Mozilla trunk
Gecko 1.9 and
XULRunner.
PHP and
CSS
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML or XML (including XML dialects such as SVG, MathML or XHTML). CSS is a cornerstone techno ...
would be supported. A community-driven fork,
KompoZer, maintains Nvu codebase and fixes bugs until a successor to Nvu is released. Glazman's project is called
BlueGriffon.
KompoZer
KompoZer is a discontinued
open source
Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...
WYSIWYG HTML editor based on the Nvu.
KompoZer was
forked as a community-driven project with development coordinated through
SourceForge.
KompoZer's WYSIWYG editing capabilities are one of the main attractions of the software. In addition, KompoZer allows direct code editing as well as a split code-graphic view.
The most recent version is KompoZer 0.8 beta 3, released February 2010, using
Gecko
Geckos are small, mostly carnivorous lizards that have a wide distribution, found on every continent except Antarctica. Belonging to the infraorder Gekkota, geckos are found in warm climates throughout the world. They range from .
Geckos ar ...
1.8.1. The stable version was 0.7.10, released in August 2007. The only regular developer said in June 2011 that development "is stalled at the moment".
[One Year At INRIA - Kaz'hack](_blank)
Kazhack.org. Retrieved on 2013-07-17.
As a
32-bit
In computer architecture, 32-bit computing refers to computer systems with a processor, memory, and other major system components that operate on data in 32-bit units. Compared to smaller bit widths, 32-bit computers can perform large calculation ...
application, it is no longer supported on
macOS Catalina and later versions.
Standards compliance
KompoZer complies with the
W3C's web standards. By default, pages are created in accordance to
HTML 4.01 Strict and use
Cascading Style Sheets
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML or XML (including XML dialects such as SVG, MathML or XHTML). CSS is a cornerstone techno ...
(CSS) for styling, but the user can change the settings and choose between:
* Strict and transitional
DTD's
* HTML 4.01 and
XHTML 1.0
* CSS styling or the old
<font>
based styling.
The application can call on the W3C
HTML validator, which uploads pages to the
W3C Markup Validation Service and checks for compliance.
See also
*
Comparison of HTML editors
*
ActiveState Komodo
Komodo Edit is a free and open source text editor for dynamic programming languages. It was introduced in January 2007 to complement ActiveState's commercial Komodo IDE. As of version 4.3, Komodo Edit is built atop the Open Komodo project. Komodo ...
*
BlueGriffon (replaces Nvu)
*
SeaMonkey (includes the Gecko-based HTML editor that KompoZer derived from)
*
List of HTML editors
References
External links
Seamonkey ProjectDaniel Glazman's BlueGriffon replacement for Mozilla Editor/Composer and NVU/KompoZerDaniel Glazman about KompoZer and the new composernvu*
Extensions and themesOfficial KompoZer website*
Project website on SourceForge*
Development and User Forums*
*
Gin Up A Quick Web Page With Kompozer
{{FLOSS
Mozilla Application Suite
Free HTML editors