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Programming The Internet IT Technology

W3's Amaya Reaches Version 8.0 43

Posted by timothy from the compliance dept.
Xusto D. H. Sals writes "The W3C's web browser-cum-editor Amaya has finally reached version 8.0. Changes are detailed here. Out of interest, how many people use this as a HTML editor, if so why, or why not?"
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W3's Amaya Reaches Version 8.0 More

W3's Amaya Reaches Version 8.0

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  • My first thought on seeing this was: Netscape. Not mozilla, I'm talking old school netscape look. I toyed with it for about 5 minutes, and I think I will stick with Studio MX thank you! :)
  • I write in pure HTML - why would anyone do different?
    • because they're lazy...i find my only use for wysiwyg's are to arrange complex table layouts that are just too mindboggling for me to sit working on for a while.
    • Because every release of HTML (or now XHTML, whatever) that comes out makes things more and more annoying to code by hand.

      I still do so, but I don't have some ugly chopped-up-graphics page that's buzzword complient. This, however, is a necessity for any corporation's home page.

    • I write in pure HTML - why would anyone do different?

      People seem to think it's easier to do HTML with a graphical toy, even when it, of course, isn't in retrospect - you get a pretty site with, shall we say, challenging HTML code that people will need to modify by hand...

      Amaya tends to generate pretty cool and even standards-compliant code, though it's still possible to do strange things with it.

      Suppose you're (like me) teaching non-techs how to do web pages with Amaya. You can start telling web new


  • Imagine what could have been the Web if Amaya, with built in MathML, SVG, and authoring (more P2P like and less client-server like) instead of what we have now.

    I think the motivating ideas behind Amaya are wonderful and would like to see them really take off.

    • Those motivating ideas were there since the beginning of the web (read Berners-Lee autobiography). However, the Mosaic team thought differently and didn't really put too much priority on including an authoring tool.
    • What we have now?

      You've got MathML built in Mozilla, SVG (ok, sort of :) built in Mozilla, what more do You want? Amaya has got it easy because it doesn't aim to be The browser and (at least from my point of view) is a kind of a lab rat for w3 specs.

    • A good testbed (Score:3, Informative)

      by ptaff ( 165113 )
      OTOH, They're pretty late in CSS implementation. The "float" property is relatively old, but has just been added in this release. Seems background-images didn't work either (CSS1).

      If you must revert to spacer GIF tricks to build a webpage out of Amaya, there's no point in using a "we lack 1998's standards" browser. You prevent the web from evolving.

      Wouldn't the Amaya developers use their time more wisely in collaborating with Mozilla/KHTML? It's nice to show off SVG and MathML, but if there's no audien

      • Re:A good testbed (Score:3, Insightful)

        by 4of12 ( 97621 )

        It's nice to show off SVG and MathML,

        A lot of people in the scientific community would welcome a means for easily publishing their work in a high quality format on the web. HTML is a nice standard when content and presentation can or should be separated. PDF permits high quality output, but the format is opaque to manual use unlike HTML.

        That means scalable vector graphics and high quality mathematics typesetting, things which up until now have been available only through graphical drawing applications s

  • Simple answer ... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by belbo ( 11799 ) on Wednesday April 23, 2003 @05:09PM (#5793750)
    Out of interest, how many people use this as a HTML editor, if so why, or why not?

    Quoth the changelog:

    Access keys for activating menu entries (Alt + a letter) are now available on Windows versions.[...]
    Amaya now allows to create/change a link without using the mouse. [...]
    Support of attribute align="left" and align="right"

    Amaya is _so_ far behind the curve, it isn't even funny anymore.
    Give me htp [sourceforge.net] and a good text editor and I got you a complete website sooner than you figure out how to handle Amaya's incredibly cumbersome interface.

    With the advent of structured markup from the XML family, graphical HTML editors seem to become superfluous - you put a logical structure into the text and have it presentated by another file, the style sheet. There's no reason why that should require any form of WYSIWYG editing, especially since all the WYSIWYG editors I know suck at handling style sheets, let alone creating them properly. They are handy when prototyping, but after that, a script can do the same job in one tenth of a time.

    • Re:Simple answer ... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by JimDabell ( 42870 )

      Amaya is _so_ far behind the curve, it isn't even funny anymore.

      It may have only just implemented things like floats, but it's had XHTML, SVG, annotations and MathML for years.

      It's a testbed project - it's not behind the curve, it just has different priorities.

      • Re:Simple answer ... (Score:1, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Note that a XHTML browser is significantly easier to implement than a Nutscrape/Internet Exploder HTML browser. You just refuse to render 99% of the pages on the Internet.

  • When I'm just writing text, I code in XHTML or XML. That's what they're designed to do, and they work well for it.

    Tables are annoying, however, and structured vector graphics (objects with ports on their sides) are impossible. I've looked into Amaya for these features, and support for them is still too primitive.

    Do any of the various free tools have a combination that can match Word-plus-simple-embedded-Visio? I've found that's all I need for 90% of my technical documentation.

  • I use Amaya every once in a while, but I generally use vim. One nice feature Amaya has is its structure view. I don't use wysiwyg editors that much, so I don't know if that is a common feature.

  • I don't use Amaya because their own web page is ugly as hell. Standards compliance is great and all, but if you can't even create the design you want to create, what's the point?
    • Tom, I don't want to be overly critical, and I realize that aesthetics are pretty subjective, but I find their webpage [w3.org] much more intuitively navigable than your snoot [snoot.org] site.
      • Yeah, well, my point is that their editor seems designed to only make that style of page. (Long vertical scroll, [H1] [H2] stuff, and the CVS tags and standards compliance buttons at the bottom, etc.) I don't claim that their page isn't navigable in a utilitarian sort of way, but it's certainly not how I'd want my web page to look. It's not really fair to compare the two based on navigability, since they have totally different purposes--snoot.org is not there for informational purposes, it's supposed to be

        • Yeah, well, my point is that their editor seems designed to only make that style of page. (Long vertical scroll, [H1] [H2] stuff, and the CVS tags and standards compliance buttons at the bottom, etc.)

          That's a fair criticism, but to be honest I'd love to have an editor/browser that did even that much well. I prefer to write documentation in HTML and don't need much more than basic markup. I can link in a stylesheet for a little pop, but that's as fancy as it needs to be. However, in tinkering with Amaya on


  • I just took a look at version 8 of Amaya. It puts tons of junk in the HMTL, making it very difficult to edit by hand.

    My experience is that it is badly designed, and not worth the time to load.
    • Really? I've used Amaya for years now, and I know HTML. Amaya just does it faster. You really have to try to make Amaya produce garbage code (get crazy with nested tables). About 95% of the time, Amaya only uses what is required by W3C standards.

      Care to give examples?


      • I just opened this web page: Complicated methods corrupt Oregon government [futurepower.net] and immediately saved it. The page has nested tables. I use them because they work with more browsers than CSS.

        Any thoughts you might have about using Amaya would be appreciated. My experience is that HTML-Kit and Mozilla Composer are better free tools. Mozilla is WYSIWYG, but it outputs HTML that is not easy to edit.

        Even Dreamweaver MX puts junk in HTML pages, and outputs pages in a poor-quality format for hand editing. Ap
        • The biggie is if you need to backspace over changes in attribute, you might want to doublecheck the raw code to make sure it's gone and not just an empty pair. This really actually applies to all HTML editors, they really only exist to speed things up rather than replace actual knowledge.

          Other than that, Amaya just needs some getting used to. Standards exist because the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Avoid Mozilla and Dreamweaver, Amaya is the only WYSIWYG HTML editor that follows the

  • .. because it does not do https request or at least 7 did not.. which means no SSL and to login to my yahoo it seems they do a http to https to http redirect thing that does not work in amaya. There is no javescript support. While some people like this javascript is really useful and used on many pages. I can use lynx on my slow hardware and it can view my yahoo. I can save my yahoo and then view it in links-gui and it is much better (links gui supports javascript but sketchy https). On my faster hardwa

  • Serious interface developers that know how to set up and use library items in dreamweaver can develop large scale web sites and applications very efficiently. I have yet to come across another tool that enables the same level of productivity when it comes to creating web pages.

    Pairing dreaweaver with a good UI guidelines document also enables consistency across a team when developing new pages.

    PS. In retrospect this looks like I am employed by Macromedia to deliver shameless plugs.. This is not the ca

    • Out of interest, how is Dreamweaver's standard compliance these days? I had heard before that it was not good (as in did not validate against the w3c thingy) and was wondering if it was better now? Note: I may have heard lies, and did not check for myself. But I don't remember disagreements where I read it.
      • I used Dreamweaver DX quite a bit lately (and vs 4... but I always hated 4s interface)... I honestly havent noticed anything non complient about the code it generates.

        Then again my pages tend to be somewhat simple.... tables for layout and CSS for formatting. (Yes I know... DX supports CSS layers and such... but I could never get them to work right LOL... I think this has more to do with my inexperiance with the tool its complience however =))

  • Among free WYSIWYG editors, Amaya is remarkable in that it will produce squeaky-clean, nicely-formatted XHTML 1.0/1.1. If for some reason you need this, Amaya is your tool (Mozilla's Composer is a nicer application but the HTML is junk, and other tools are not cross-platform). The real mystery with Amaya is why it does not follow any known user interface standards. This makes it quite difficult to use. Even a simple table in Amaya is an exercise in confusion.
  • I've downloaded and tried using most new Amaya versions since 2.x. I *really* like the idea of browse/edit. But Amaya has consistently been schizophrenic; it is ahead of the curve on several aspects (standards like CSS, XHTML, SVG) and way, way behind the curve/competition on many other aspects. For a given page here and there it works very nicely but I have never been able to use it to browse to many modern sites that contain JavaScript, Java, etc. I think Amaya is a wonderful idea but ... R.Parr Tempor

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