Netscape Composer - HTML Editor: Nostalgia Retrotech

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Netscape Composer is a WYSIWYG HTML editor initially developed by Netscape Communications Corporation in 1997, and packaged as part of the Netscape Communicator, Netscape 6 and Netscape 7 range of Internet suites. In addition, Composer can also view and edit HTML code, preview pages in Netscape Navigator, check spelling, publish websites, and supports most major types of formatting. Source of text

In the post exactly prior to this one you are reading, I had been reminiscing about a piece of software that was one of the first WYSIWYG editors that I had used to encode in HTML in the mid-90s of the 20th century. It was about HotDog, now I want to comment on another editor that is also among my first steps and brings back memories, this time it is the Netscape Composer.

I enjoyed the luck of starting to use this editor at the end of the year in which it was presented, 1997, although that was because I frequented the Computer Laboratory of the Faculty of Engineering of the University where I was studying, even though it was not my own. Faculty, since what I was studying was a humanistic and social career, but for various reasons, I always felt attracted to computing.

The arrival of Netscape Composer was like an earthquake, it was a whole suite, where the editor, the browser and the mail client worked integrally, in addition to its handling of FTP connections also allowed to remotely control the published contents, of course you could first You program everything in your local terminal before uploading it to the server, so you could do preliminary tests and only hang it on the server when you had a 'production' version ready

Although HotDog was my first editor that allowed me to save work and skip the matter of having to code from scratch and everything in plain text, I must admit that Netscape Composer was much more impressive, it was 'all in one' or something like a 'swiss army knife' that had everything you needed to navigate, create content, manage websites, and also interact with other Internet services, such as email, FTP servers, and more.

I always regretted that this browser, which was in my opinion of a higher quality than the rest of those that were available at the time, lost in the 'War of Browsers' and ended up falling, certainly its legacy continued as Mozilla, but it was never the same.

By the way, both Nvu and KompoZer are also derived editors, from both, I have to admit that KompoZer is more recent and more refined in its interface, but personally I still use a protable version of Nvu to do some things, already You know, the old tricks can still work if you know how to apply them well.

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