Kaz’hack

KompoZer 0.8b2 is finally ready. Few visible changes, but a lot of bugfixes and code cleaning under the hood.

You can grab KompoZer 0.8b2 here: kompozer.net/download.php

Enjoy, and please report bugs!

Bug Fixes

We’ve tried to solve the most frequently reported bugs:

• the CSS Editor shouldn't add those annoying “*|” strings in the selectors any more
• the preview in the “Image Properties” box now works properly
• better FTP support (right-click in the Site Manager context menu)
• the markup cleaner doesn't crash on nested lists any more
• Enter in a paragraph now creates a new paragraph
• the “Credits” panel in the About box is back ;-)

KompoZer 0.8b2 is now a more reliable editor: the regressions in the CSS editor were a complete blocker for myself, so I guess it’s been a real nightmare for most users. We’ve fixed a lot of small bugs and I think the overall user experience should be much better than with the previous versions.

18*4 Localized Binaries

Cédric Corazza, our l10n lead, has done a great job to release localized binaries for all the supported languages at once. This time he’s had much more work than for the previous beta:

• we had 9 locales for the 0.8b1 release, there are 18 locales for 0.8b2:
  • Catalan, Dutch, Hungarian, Japanese got ready after the 0.8b1 release
  • Simplified Chinese, Esperanto, Finnish, Portuguese, Upper Sorbian have been added for the 0.8b2
• Cédric has made Windows™ installers, which should put an end to one of the most frequent feature request
• he’s built all binaries manually, as we don’t have any kind of script to ease this task (I considered that as a typical “l10n lead job”)

Cédric, congrats! and go get some sleep, the Korean and Bulgarian locales are getting ready. ;-) I’ll definitely write a few scripts to ease your work for the next release.

Inline Spell Checker

The inline spell checker in KompoZer 0.7.10 was inherited from Nvu, it was implemented with a specific patch against the Gecko 1.7 core and it caused a lot of freezes and crashes. As a result, most users (including myself) disabled it and I didn’t see it as an important feature to bring back in KompoZer 0.8.

As you can guess, a lot of users had a very different opinion on this. :-)

Unlike Gecko 1.7, Gecko 1.8.1 has a very good built-in inline spell checker. I’ve had a look at Thunderbird’s code and I found out enabling the inline spell checker in KompoZer was a snap. I’m sorry I didn’t do it sooner — but now it’s done, and it’s working fine as far as I know.

DOM Explorer Sidebar

I’m working with Fabien ’Kasparov’ Rocu on the next version of the DOM Explorer. As Fabien is implementing his ideas in an extension, I had to clean up the DOM Explorer and add a few hooks for his addon. To ease the development of his add-on, we’ve decided to implement a part of his work directly in KompoZer 0.8b2:

• the DOM Explorer now shows the HTML attributes of the current element
• a double-click on an element in the DOM Explorer brings up its “Property” dialog

The real improvement will come with Fabien’s extension, which should be released in April 2010. I’ll come back to this in another blog post.

New Keyboard Shortcuts

I’m known to be a dangerous pervert when it comes to computer keyboards — I admit I hate having to use a mouse when I’m editing a text. These new keyboard shortcuts aren’t documented, you can see them as a hidden bonus:

• Ctrl+(Up|Down) moves the caret to the (beginning|end) of the current element
• Ctrl(+Shift)+Enter adds a new line after (before) the current element
• Alt+Shift+Enter switches to “Source” view

The Ctrl+Up/Down shortcut is more than a productivity booster. One of the known problems of the Mozilla editor component is that in some situations, it can be difficult to put the caret where you want it: for instance, there’s no easy way to put the caret right after a <div> block if it’s the last block in the page. With KompoZer 0.7.10 you had to select the <div> in the status bar, press the right arrow and hit Return; now all you need is to do a Ctrl+Down.

The “Source” View Still Sucks…

…and I’m aware of that. Please configure KompoZer to use your favorite text editor to work on the HTML source, there’s a specific “HTML” button by default in the main toolbar for that. I can’t help it, I hate the “Source” view in Nvu and KompoZer 0.7:

• I don’t see much point in a pseudo syntax hilighting that doesn’t update as you type
• I don’t see any point in showing line numbers that don’t match the *real* line numbers in the HTML file
• nobody understands why the “Source” view hides the document tabs
• it was the main source of crashes for KompoZer 0.7

The SeaMonkey-like plaintext editor, in my opinion, is much better at the moment — and on my first trunk builds (KompoZer 0.9a1pre / Gecko 1.9.3), Bespin is already working quite well.

Again, I understand a lot of users have a very different opinion on this, so I’ve tried an interesting experiment with this “Source” view: basically, I’ve re-written the main <tabeditor> element so it includes its own source editor. This embedded source editor could be used either for the “Split” view or for the “Source” view, and I could switch to “Source” mode without loosing the document tabs.

Unfortunately, this new <tabeditor> element raised a few problems that I couldn’t solve easily for this 0.8b2 release, so I’ve had to revert to the good old plaintext editor. For the 0.8b3 I’ll probably re-implement an Nvu-like “Source” view, rather than spending too much time on a feature that won’t work as well as Bespin: I prefer to release KompoZer 0.8 sooner in order to propose a Bespin-based KompoZer 0.9 as soon as possible.

The HTML Serializer Still Sucks…

…but we’re working on it. As you may have noticed, the HTML output of KompoZer 0.8 is already much cleaner than the one we had in KompoZer 0.7, especially if you check the “reformat HTML source” option: the most visible point is, there are (almost) no empty lines any more in the output files. But your well-defined indentation is still destroyed by KompoZer, which is a real pain when switching to “Source” mode.

Of course, you can use HTML Tidy as a workaround; I even used to design an Nvu extension for that. But this means dealing with temp files, serializing the files twice (once with KompoZer + reformatting with Tidy), and risking data losses (especially in utf-8, don’t ask me why). And the HTML code in the “Source” view is still a mess.

The great news is, Laurent Jouanneau has backported his XHTML serializer to Gecko 1.8.1 so I could use it for KompoZer 0.8 — and the first results look great! See this small example I saved with KompoZer 0.7.10, KompoZer 0.8b2 and KompoZer 0.8b3pre. Looks like we can finally get rid of HTML Tidy!

Almost Done

There are four main points to address before we can release a third (and hopefully last) beta:

• adapt KompoZer 0.8 to the new HTML serializer;
• get some kind of colored source view working;
• fix the bugs in the “Split” view so people start using it;
• work on FTP support to replace the current “Publish” button.

Please test this new version and report bugs. Many thanks to all users who donated or gave some time to keep this project running!