NVU Wishlist
NVU is great, and I want it to get even better. So I’m presenting my “NVU wishlist”, organized in no particular order other than what I could remember being annoyed by. I am thinking in terms of what I want as a user, not how hard it would be to implement, so some of these requests are unlikely to make a NVU 1.0 release:
- Smart quotes. I like proper open- and close-quotes, they make a page look professional. And when the quotes are serialized, I want them to use numeric entities instead of “ and ” because that is much more portable than the HTML entities.
- Don’t use “body text”. I don’t ever want to use body text, I always want real paragraphs. Currently (as of .50) using paragraphs is fairly painful, because mysterious body text blocks appear where I don’t want them.
- Have a structured outline mode. Instead of the left-hand ruler, which I don’t ever use, I would like a structured outline displaying my headings and paragraphs. It is not necessary that this allow the headings/paragraphs to collapse, although that might be kinda cool.
- Auto-TOC and auto-index features. I would frequently like to be able to have an index page with links into sub-pages (and sometimes back again). Also, automatic or semi-automatic linking of index and glossary pages; using DHTML to display these glossary items in another popup window would be a cool addon. Note that this is something that might be handled really well by an NVU extension, whenever NVU moves to the toolkit extension-management architecture.
- Upload/save relative-linked documents properly. My FTP server loads the website from ~/httpdocs/, and I make extensive use of site-relative links (link href=”/index-new.css”). These links are not loaded properly in edit mode, because the relative-URI parsing tries to load them from FTP ~/index-new.css which fails miserably. This is really a bug and not a feature request, and glazou and I have already discussed a technical solution, so it may be already happening in the NVU 0.6 series.
- Local/Remote site manager. The left-hand toolbar is nice if you are editing pages directly, but I frequently need to keep a local copy of the website and update it in batches. A Dreamweaver-style local-and-remote site manager would be invaluable to me.
October 19th, 2004 at 8:12 pm
Integrated visual stylesheet editing without having to know what stylesheets are. Do all the formatting via inline stylsheets and have global stylsheets that can be set up separately. But at the very least there must be a visual stylsheet editor if NVU will gain any serious usage and be at least comparable to something like Contribute.
bsmedberg says: That might be important for some users, but it’s not important to me. I actually think it would be more worthwhile to provide a good set of default style sheets that authors can choose from, to alleviate some of the ugliness of unstyled HTML.
October 19th, 2004 at 9:23 pm
XHTML! It’s still not there…
bsmedberg says: personally, I don’t give a damn about xhtml, as long as IE won’t render it properly with a application/xhtml+xml mime type.
October 19th, 2004 at 11:08 pm
I agree with the “body text” suggestion. I’m able to use the “paragraph” mode with Nvu right now, but it always adds a <br> before every end paragraph tag. This thing defintely needs to be addressed. The right ruler has made me disable both the rulers from view. The vertical ruler changes its width depending upon space needed to write its width in digits, e.g. 229px would be much thinner than 19px. Vertical text(tb) would be a better option (when implemented).
Its nice to hear that the “web-root” thing has been sorted out and that it may be in 0.6. I’m sure it will get better and better with time.
One more thing that needs to be addressed is the css editor. I have been thinking of writing a few ideas which came up when I was testing 0.50. Your wishlist gave me the final push to smooth up the scribbled notes(second set) and put them online.
KDS
October 20th, 2004 at 3:05 am
I would suggest it would be easier do these things if nvu were split into 2 programs, the html editor and the site manager. It would seem more logical to me to have the site manager start up the appropriate editor for the file concerned (html, png, svg, etc.) This would allow, just one example, graphical navigation elements to be generated automatically.
I have written a small program to help me manage my website, see here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/kontent/
This does some simple things like generating index, Table of contents, RSS
feeds. But I don’t think I could extend it to support Templates, libraries,
etc. without hooks into an editor such as nvu. Is there any way that I
could do this?
I have put some ideas here:
http://www.euclideanspace.com/software/information/cms/duplicateInformation/
Martin
October 20th, 2004 at 4:48 am
> One more thing that needs to be addressed is the css editor
At the very least the Cascades UI needs to be improved. It should never ne necessary to type in the MIME type of the stylesheet, for example. In fact, one should never have to type anything that the editor should either know or be able to present a sensible set of choices for (media types, for example). Additionally, the dialog is way too complex. What does ‘link elt’ mean to a beginner? Who uses the @media button? Why do I get a set of dysfunctional tabs when I click on a stylesheet in the tree? Why is there a ‘refresh’ button and when should I use it? I actually have the beginnings of some patches to sort some of this stuff out but, with out a net connection at home, I’m not sure I’ll ever have the time to make them into something worth reviewing :(
October 20th, 2004 at 6:40 am
I would like more complete site management – moving files and folders on the server.
Maybe a site map, ala FP
October 20th, 2004 at 9:53 am
– Paste without formatting
– Better table editing
– Generally just fixing low-level bugs that cause the HTML to get messed up
November 9th, 2004 at 1:41 pm
Agree with the first poster: Needs regular paragraph breaks – currently I have to go to source view and insert them by hand, needs smart quotes, also mdash, and ndash.
December 19th, 2006 at 12:34 pm
My main problem with using NVU has been its crashes. Sometimes I use it with no problems, then some days I suddenly cannot copy and paste properly, or save a document, without closing it down and opening again. I guess these are just minor bugs, but it does make using a pain at times.
Short cut keys would be good – e.g. if you hightlight text to be an h2 title, it would be good to have a short cut key (ctrl 2for example) and so forth.
Also a “save as back-up” could be handy to allow you to quickly save a page before editing further, without over writing the original. Undoing changes has been another buggy area for me actually, sometimes I have been unable to undo my changes and have to close the page and start again.
One last wish item – an open in browser of choice button. or open in all browsers on pc. So once a page is saved, you could open it in all your pages to check it looks OK before uploaded it.
But all in all, NVU is a great tool.
Cheers,
Jon.