next Amaya upgrades

I just want to give some comments as to the next upgrades of Amaya. We
use Amaya for research projects, mostly on solaris 5.6 platforms.

======== Possible bugs:

- I also had the "Thot irrecoverable error" problems, but I have not
enough time to specify the scenarios. Among others, I had this problem
when playing with the HTML.trans file, and having it reloaded. Idem
when modifying the CSS files and reloading.

- bizarrely, the submenu "Circle/Polygon/Rectange" comes in the top
left part of my screen whenever a new Amaya window is opened. This
menu does not react, and remains there until I quit.

======== Short-term suggestions:

- I claim that CSS can also be used to offer several views of a
single page. In this context, the menu "stylesheets" should not only
indicate what sheets are loaded, but also let the user select between
sheets or load another one. So try to reuse the philosophy of P
schemas, and let the user choose the view. That would put that powerful concept
on HTML level.

- we need a thourougher CSS support. For example, ensure to support the
"display:none" properties, to verify the management of background
colors, and to insure that CSS modifications are displayed after
reloading.

- some parts of CSS2 could leverage the use of Amaya; eg, placing a
(non-editable) label before an element would let the editor simulate
a form-based input system.

- I find a bit hard to organize a page with <div> divisions. I especially
missed the "surround" command, which would embed the selection within a chosen
tag.

- XML comes rapidly. Before offering a full support (DTD-aware, etc),
you might correctly support any non-html tags (load, save, select,
permit the user input, apply CSS rules to them, etc.). Somewhat like
Symposia would give if it still existed. For the moment, Amaya seems to keep
unknown tags, but it is easy to produce a non well-formed through copy/paste.

- the structure transformation utility (HTML.trans) is great
(bravo!). It could be worth to make it more robust against syntax
errors etc. This feature is unique, and has a high potential leveraging power.

======== Longer-term suggestions:

Of course, we are looking forward to The final release of Amaya,
which would offer among others :

- fully cooperative editor "a la Byzance"

- complete XML support with DTDs, schemas, Data formats, Xlinks, CSS3, XSl

- scripts management

- database gateway, components management, versioning, etc.

Have courage ;-)

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Received on Tuesday, 20 April 1999 03:18:42 UTC