Netscape Composer was my first introduction to web development. As a kid, I created my first web pages using it. Those pages never made it online, but I proudly carried them around on a floppy disk to show them off on family members’ and friends’ computers. This is likely how I got the understanding that websites are just made of files. Using Netscape Composer also taught me basic web vocabulary, such as “page” and “hyperlink”.
Of course, the web landscape has evolved immensely since then. I was curious to try out that dated software again and see what its limitations were, and what the code it produces looks like from a 2024 perspective. The first thing I needed was a goal. I decided to try and reproduce the home page of my personal website as closely as the application allowed it. That seemed like a sensible aim as my website has a rather minimalistic design, with very little that should be completely out of reach for an antiquated tool.
↫ Pier-Luc Brault
What a fun exercise.
This is bizarre for me to read because I came across a colleague doing the very same about a year ago, the problem was they were about to retire and needed someone to take over caretaking of an internal website they managed, the intranet site was up and functional and secure delivering queries and applying updates to a legacy database, but they could not find anybody willing to buy into it the ongoing maintenance of the site without a full rewrite. Funnily, there is a lot of this about on intranets all over the place, piles and piles of legacy code customisations built on early foundations of software, ageing Sharepoint sites are another I regularly come across.
Yep, seen plenty of those “pets” floating around over the years. Invariably they are also written in a way that only makes sense to the author, as they never documented anything, because they knew how it worked and it was “obvious”!
Alt-1 would’ve given him a ☺, even inside Netscape Composer, I bet.
That requires font substitution and is more of an XP-era innovation—not something that would work very well under Windows 98.
I have not written HTML pages in a long while.
(As most of the modern web has been taken over by either JavaScript / TypeScript frameworks (like React), or server side technologies like c#/razor).
However the most “fun” I had with a tool was the Expression Web. This was a rare free software from Microsoft, and worked well without getting in the way with custom stuff (anyone remembers FrontPage?)
For historical reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Expression_Web
(Not sure whether you can install it on modern systems even if you can download the archives)
Microsoft Expression still works and I think it’s still available somewhere on the MS site. It doesn’t support PNG images, but the HTML5 output is not bad if you remove all the legacy FrontPage code
@gunfleet
I think MS pulled Expression Web Trial from the site a couple of years back, if I recall correctly the Web Trial version had a major security issue.
Yes looks like it’s gone now from the MS site, it’s still around on other sites but take care obs. The file name is “Web_Trial_en.exe” version 4.0.I460.0 98.7MB assume the security issue would only apply if you used the internal ftp/sftp feature, it would be fine for just offline editing and uploading with Filezilla or similar.
Thanks,
Might check it out on the next web project (whenever it comes), but definitely in an offline VM.
BlueGriffon WYSIWYG editor is based on the original Netscape Composer, it uses Gecko these days
http://www.bluegriffon.org/
Yeah, I just was tryign to piece this together. First here was Nvu, which was composer’s code base, then they did a re-write based on more modern mozilla code which is Bluegriffon, whike some one forked off nvu to create komposer. I used to keep tabs on it waiting on it to compete with … dream weaver. Which never really happened. NVU wasn’t really that different than composer I never saw much progress as a user, but I gave up before Bluegriffon was created. Will check that out.
There was another fork I think, Bluefish but that only has a source view, not split source/WSIWYG like Bluegriffon
@gunfleet
I came across Bluefish quite a few years back, it was picked up by the high school / STEM education sector teaching web basics, before Win 10 and x64 became a thing. I was there to repair some old donated lab equipment, the students were using a kit including Bluejay, JGrasp and Bluefish to design projects to monitor and log experiments 24×7, pre-IoT era lab kit based on Win XP or Win 2000 Controller PCs. I vaguely remember all this somehow being hooked into OpenOffice( probably StarOffice back then ).
Composer is still available in SeaMonkey