- From: Ka-Ping Yee <s-ping@orange.cv.tottori-u.ac.jp>
- Date: Wed, 04 Sep 1996 19:50:07 +0900
- To: W3C Amaya mailing list <www-amaya@w3.org>
[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