May 20, 2011

WYSIWYG Web Editor for Linux

If you're looking for a WYSIWYG Web Editor for Linux, look no farther than BlueGriffon. The recently released 1.0 of BlueGriffon brings an impressive toolset to Web designers and other users who want a slick, open source, Web Editor.
For some users (like me) Vim or another text editor is all that's wanted for creating Web pages or working with CSS, etc. If it was good enough for Web pages in 1999, why change? But not everybody is happy with technology that was cutting edge when Flock of Seagulls were popular.
Many users have cut their teeth using WYSIWYG tools, and don't want to wrestle HTML and CSS code. There's certainly been plenty of demand for a WYSIWYG editor — and now we have one, BlueGriffon. Actually, it's not the first on the scene — there was Nvu, but it fell by the wayside after the sponsorship from Linspire dried up. BlueGriffon is sort of a continuation of that, since it's the same developer leading the effort.

What is BlueGriffon?

BlueGriffon is a Mozilla-based "content editor" for the Web. The core application (as opposed to add-ons, which we'll cover in a minute) is tri-licensed under the Mozilla Public License 1.1, the GPLv2, and the LGPLv2.1. It uses the Firefox Gecko rendering engine for its WYSIWYG view, and seems to inherit quite a bit of other code from Firefox as well.
In terms of looks and feel, BlueGriffon seems quite a bit like Nvu, and Mozilla (and Netscape) Composer before it.
But it's been updated quite a bit since the Composer days. It's set to handle any of the current HTML/XHTML specifications. I hesitate to use the "HTML5" moniker, since that's so overused to mean so many things today, but BlueGriffon does have support for elements in the current HTML5 specification. That includes support for embedding audio and video using HTML5 elements.
BlueGriffon also includes an SVG editor, support for CSS up to CSS3 — including a CSS parser (JSCSSP) that is meant to ensure that its CSS is valid for all browsers — not just Firefox. I'm not a CSS expert, but in playing with BlueGriffon a bit, it seems that you can produce some really interesting results without having to know much (if any) CSS at all.
These days you not only need a Web site that's optimized for all the desktop browsers, but also a site that renders well in.........
Read more at Linux.com

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