Long ago there was a tool called Composer which came bundled with Netscape. For a lot of people it was the first html editing tool they tried. I hated it – it encouraged folks to write terrible font-tag laden html. Years later and the folks from Linspire have taken the remnants of Composer and turned it into Nvu, a free, cross platform, open source html editor. It’s relatively lightweight, works everywhere, and in comparison to the now bloated beyond belief Dreamweaver it’s a joy to use. This is not a tool for professionals who spend their days writing html, but it’s the perfect tool for that departmental coordinator who needs to occasionally edit an html page, or the class of students who need to build websites as part of their coursework. We’re using Nvu on the Skidmore campus to replace Dreamweaver in a lot of contexts – the public labs, for student use, and even for some departmental web development work. You can still end up with font tag laden html but it’s actually cleaner than the junked up code the average user is producing with Dreamweaver these days.