PlexNex:

Here is an Interview -- the first in a series -- with Pioneers of the World Wide Web. These are the people you need to thank for making the Web experience we know today -- for better or worse -- possible.

This is a Q&A with Daniel Glazman, programmer of the old Mozilla Composer HTML editor, who is leading the effort to rescue Nvu from end-of-life obscurity in the form of KompoZer. As Daniel says, "Stay tuned."

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Q: Nvu, wtf?

Nvu was based off the Mozilla 1.7 trunk and it was too hard to make it evolve from that codebase. Nvu is dead and won't be updated. But it still has a large users community, estimated to more than 3 millions users...

I am currently working on Nvu's successor, nicknamed "Composer" for the time being but that won't be the final name. Compared to that new Composer, Nvu will look like a prehistoric beast. Floating panels, extensibility API, syntax highligh in the source view, advanced CSS editing, and more. Stay tuned!

Q: I was looking to download Nvu but the site seems to be unavailable. Apparently, the project & its sponsorship are evolving (away from Linspire). What happened?

Linspire was recently sold to Xandros. The site nvu.com itself does not belong to Linspire, but to its former CEO, Kevin Carmony. Kevin was kind enough to preserve a home page at www.nvu.com redirecting to Linspire's Nvu site and Kompozer's site. Apparently, there's nobody at Linspire caring about nvu any more and nvudev.com seems to be unreachable. Ping Michael Robertson ?

Q: You're French! We've watched the Gendarmerie (Firefox | OpenOffice.org | Linux) and heard about some important French government and private-sector (Peugeot + Novell) leading-edge movement toward Software Freedom. Have you been involved with some web-oriented engagements you can discuss that would shed further light for the rest of the world on commitments to better web-infrastructure and information-architectural techniques involving the software we love? What are the Universities up to? Or are they completely lame like in the USA (excepting MIT & Stanford)?

Free Software steps more into european administrations and universities every day. The usual reasons: cost, maintainance, freedom of choice, independance from big software monopolies. But there is a big issue behind FOSS spread: support... there are not a lot of companies offering serious support for free software and/or adaptation to corporate/governmental needs. When I mean serious support, I mean being a correct proxy between developers and users, able to correctly identify and escalate complex or security bugs, and even fix simple bugs.

My company developed MPL-based software for a few organizations, here in Europe and in the US. They all wanted to use the quality and adaptability of Gecko, the rendering engine inside Mozilla Firefox, to build their own piece of software. Firefox has an impressivemarket share here on the Old Continent. In some european countries, Firefox went beyond the 50% market share, and that of course triggers a lot of interest from companies who originally had only commercial solutions in front of them to build software...

Q: One of my favorite things (along with Coltrane, Pilsner Urquel & Laphroiag) is CSS. Have you been involved in its development at W3C?

I joined the CSS WG on behalf of Electricité de France back in 1996. I worked on CSS 2 and remained involved in the CSS Working Group until today. I was appointed co-chairman of the Group in april 2008, along with Peter Linss from Hewlett-Packard. In these twelve years, I authored or edited several specs or proposals in the Group. The spec I am currently authoring with Dave Hyatt from Apple is CSS Variables.