More Amaya comments

[Reposting the following to the list, after
subscribing, for everyone's perusal...]

Here come some more thoughts of mine, after trying
out Amaya:

I'm impressed!!  Give me some more time using Amaya
as an editor and it may well become my editor of choice.
Also, Amaya is the only browser i've ever seen which
does asynchronous name lookups.  Hooray!

I can't tell if Amaya is invoking stylesheets for me
properly, because nothing shows up in the CSS window
even when the document has a stylesheet.

I am using the Linux ELF binary (alpha 0.8 release).
Visiting pages like

    http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/Style/css/msie/insight1.htm

yields underlined anchors, but no stylesheet rules
in the CSS window.  The stylesheet says

    H1 { font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; }

but Amaya isn't finding my helvetica font for the H1
(everything shows up in Times).

Experimenting with $HOME/.amaya.css:

    - setting line-height to anything seems to yield
      many hundreds of pixels of space between lines

    - margins don't seem to combine properly
      (try some of the examples at /css/msie under
      the www.w3.org/pub/WWW/Style stuff).

The scroll bars have a mysterious gap on either end
which never goes away.  The behaviour of the scroll
bars seems, on the whole, pretty shaky; clicking in
the empty area doesn't always move a page, the length
of the scrollbar thumb seems to vary while moving
through a single page, and the lack of update while
dragging the thumb makes it hard to see where you are
going.  They look exactly like Motif scrollbars, yet
they don't behave the same way...

I hope that the current model doesn't prevent
progressive display during loading as a future feature.

The foreground and background colours of text within
the selection seem to be randomly determined (it
looks like they are just being taken out of the
existing X colormap, but not set to anything consistent).
It would be better to choose consistent colours, because
currently selected text is sometimes unreadable.

The entire selection is redrawn every time it changes,
which makes the selected text flash a lot.  It would
be better just to draw the bit that is changing (either
add to the end of the selection or erase the piece
removed).  The window should scroll when the user tries
to drag the selection past an edge.

Clicking once positions the cursor.  A second click,
within your "double-click interval" (which i estimate
is about 1/2 second), is then treated as a double click
if the mouse hasn't moved, which makes sense.  But a
second click within the double-click interval anywhere
else gets *ignored*, and it shouldn't be.

As Bert Bos has noted, the ability to see the target
of a link or the name of a target anchor when the mouse
passes over the anchor would be useful.  Also, i agree
with him that it would be nice to configure the focus
policy so that i could click in one of the window panes
(document, location, title) and have focus stay in that
pane even if the mouse is elsewhere in the window.

It would be nice to provide a way to ask to open a
document in a new window, instead of having to change
the document and then navigate the link.

Don't label the buttons "i", "B", and "TT" if what
they really do is "em", "strong", and "code"!  Let's
not confuse people more than we have to.  I'm very
glad that the buttons give you a convenient way to
do semantic markup; just make the buttons say what they do.

Don't call the initial view a "WYSIWYG view".  That's
not what it is (and there is no such thing on the WWW,
because you can never expect all browsers to render
the document in exactly the same way).  It misleads
users into thinking that Amaya is some sort of DTP or
layout program.  Just call it a "layout view" or a
"formatted view" or a "graphical view" (as opposed
to the text-based "alternate view").  I'm very glad
you provided the alternate view, by the way -- that is
an *excellent* idea.

Not to mention that the structure view is absolutely
beautiful, and the structured editing is wondrous.

I can't get all the way to the end of a line (rightward)
in the structure view: the scrollbar won't go any
farther.  Selecting black text in the structure view
works only up to a certain right margin, and then
continues to select but invisibly (visible in other
views).

I'd like to be able to just close windows (using the
window manager's facilities) instead of having to
hit "Cancel" or "File->Close".  Right now if i close
any window, Amaya dies altogether.

Try moving the insertion-point cursor (the two-pixel
vertical bar) one pixel to the left.  It sometimes
completely overlaps thin things (like punctuation)
and gets a little confusing.  Or make it only one pixel
thick.

I need the ability to reload.  Going back to the
Location field and hitting return doesn't get Amaya
to do anything.  Could you add this function?
(I guess that "reload" and "revert" are much the
same thing.)

Thanks very much for taking the time to look
through all of this.


Ping

Received on Wednesday, 4 September 1996 12:54:10 UTC