Daniel Glazman, Mozilla Composer, and Nvu's future

I have been sitting on this story for some time. Daniel Glazman has been writing a number of posts recently on a brand new project he's just starting. Daniel Glazman was involved in the development of the Netscape and Mozilla Composer (now called SeaMonkey) as well as the author of the Nvu Web authoring system. All these composers contain a WYSIWYG HTML editor and in many ways can be the considered the open source versions of Microsoft's Frontpage and Adobe's Dreamweaver.

I personally like to use Nvu now and then. I often recommend Nvu to those that need an easy way to compose Web pages and wish to avoid "writing in code" as much as possible. I don't use Nvu or any WYSISYG editor too much these days because I have found that about everything I need to produce online content is self contained with today's content management systems. However, there are times when you don't want to do your work online, making the HTML editors a valuable tool when you need them.

Getting back to the point of this post, Daniel Glazeman has made several posts on his blog letting readers know that he is no longer working with either Nvu or the SeaMonkey projects. Instead, he wishes to work on a brand new composer. In a post he writes:

For those who did not get the message :Nvu 1.0 is - for me - a dead end. Just like Seamonkey was left to the community, I am glad to leave Nvu 1.0 codebase to Kazé who started integrating bug fixes but I remind him that Nvu is a trademark by Linspire Inc....

...Mozilla Composer won't be just a xulrunner- and gecko1.8-based revamping of Nvu 1.0, it will be something totally new, entirely rewritten, and the feature list will make Nvu look like a prehistoric web editor, which it is.

Finally, at a later post he clarifies and emphasizes even further that this new composer is a completely new project. Glazman writes that:

  1. Composer is not a Mozilla Corporation product
  2. it's a Mozilla.org project
  3. I will then stop referring to mozilla composer or m/c and only use the name Composer starting today.

Glazman, then goes on to say the name of his new project will need to be better identified than just "Composer" to remove confusion between his Composer and composer included in Sea Monkey. He of course is open for suggestions in both name and logo for the new project.