The roads I take...

On FOSDEM, I had a quite interesting talk with Kazé, who's doing KompoZer, the continuation of the standalone Nvu website editor. So far, the focus has been mainly on maintaining and fixing the application based on the old Gecko-1.7-based core, with a lot of bug fixes to make it more usable and smaller additions.

Now, Kazé has announced the first alpha for KompoZer 0.8, mainly consisting of a port to Gecko 1.8.1, which makes it come along at least to a version that still gets some kind of security fixes - and apparently more stable, to cite the announcement:
This is good news for all users of that application, for sure.

Even more good news, even for SeaMonkey is coming in another cite from that announcement:
Actually, that was also what we were talking about in Brussels - Kazé thinks that it's probably a good idea to port the KompoZer code "back and forward" to SeaMonkey Composer on Gecko 1.9.1 and create a standalone editor as well as the future version of SeaMonkey Composer from that same code, which would help both of us: Him because he can have his being code based on the most current backend, get that code reviewed and has a chance of getting changes into Gecko and the toolkit, and us for getting new features into Composer and having that part of our suite maintained.

This all isn't final yet, but it looks like it's a good option for both sides and results in a win-win situation. I hope we can move forward with this option and get a modern website editor both as a standalone application and as a part of SeaMonkey.

Update:
One thing I forgot to mention above is that active work on the editor and even more the editor UI probably also will have a third winner: Thunderbird. The HTML mail composer uses parts of the same code and probably can profit from active work on this code as well.