- From: Paul Derbyshire <derbyshire16@hotmail.com>
- Date: Fri, 11 Jun 1999 03:41:16 EDT
- To: www-amaya@w3.org
I must say that I am frankly shocked. 2.0a isn't release-quality software or even beta quality. It is rife with bugs, many of them showstoppers. Here is a short list of the most serious. Showstoppers: * Amaya 2.0a seems to simply spontaneously close itself sometimes. It does this for no apparent reason sometimes; other times it seems to be misinterpreting a command as meaning "quit". As an example, get a document open and structure view for it open. Select some text in a P element in the document. Choose the menu option to make it a link; then click anywhere to get the URL entry box. Cancel this. Go to the structure view and locate your link; select the anchor element (which should have A href= with nothing after href=). Pull the attributes menu and choose href, and Amaya will behave as though you chose "quit without saving changes"! * Sometimes, after a spontaneous close event, if you re-launch Amaya 2.0a it says that the last session "failed" (which is not very informative, not to mention describing an event that should never happen). It asks if you want to recover backup files or start a new session. It offers two options, confirm and cancel. The confirm option, which presumably is supposed to recover the backup files, does not work. It causes Amaya to crash in kernel32.dll instead! Why this option is included when it is completely nonfunctional evades my comprehension. Non-showstoppers that are massive nuisances. * Amaya 2.0a sometimes does not behave correctly with regard to the arrow keys. This usually happens when editing a paragraph containing <em> and other style elements. Sometimes, the arrow keys cause the insertion point to jump about nonsensically. Worse, backspace and del sometimes behave abnormally as well, deleting a whole chunk of text that shouldn't be deleted! Typing a character sometimes also has this effect, replacing a block of text. In all cases, it seems Amaya is behaving as though a block of text is selected when it isn't. Fortunately, the undo command corrects Amaya's mistakes, so this isn't a showstopper/data loss bug. * Shift+arrow keys don't extend the selection. They act like normal arrow keys instead. * Shift-click and shift-drag in text don't create a selection, unlike every other piece of Windows software known to mankind. * Sometimes Amaya 2.0a refuses to insert an H1, H2, etc. element inside a P element, or a P element inside a TD element. This is frequent but irregular. This even affects structure view. The only way to work around this behavior seems to be to go to structure view and: * For making a heading, make a P element instead and then change it to an H3 or whatever; * For making a P inside a TD, in structure view click inside the TD and type a letter, then hit enter; this makes a character followed by a P element. Now delete the letter and the carriage return from above the P element. * Tables seem to default to a random width that doesn't always fit around the contents well. Workaround: Speficy a width, e.g. width=100%. * Sometimes a click in text doesn't simply reposition the insertion point, instead creating a selection between the former position of the insertion point and the click location. This is unpredictable. * Trying to drag a selection or an element in the structure view to move it doesn't work. * Trying to resize an imagemap shape with a ctrl-right-drag doesn't always work. It seems very sensitive to the mouse position; some pixels that are part of the control handle graphic don't work, and Amaya tries to resize the image instead! * MathML editing seems finicky. Sometimes it inserts spurious MSUPs; sometimes the characters seem to run together; sometimes a copied equation shows up with the outermost enclosing MROW stripped away; and sometimes the Math palette and the Symbol palette don't display correctly. This last seems related to Internet Explorer; if IE is open this problem is likely, and if you close IE it goes away promptly. * Sometimes images don't display; this glitch usually happens when IE is running. Closing IE makes the images redisplay. * Sometimes when more than one document is open, closing one document window closes down Amaya. Other times it just closes down the one document window. This behavior is not consistent and not predictable. * The hand icon "select destination" thing when making a link is somewhat of a misfeature, being awkward. Frequently, one isn't linking to another open document or an anchor in the current one, but instead to a document that isn't open or a far-off Web site. In that case, one tries to click somewhere invalid to dismiss the select-thing and get a dialog box for entering the URL. Unfortunately, doing that often changes the selection for some reason, so that what's selected is no longer what you want to make a link. Now if you hit cancel, you have a link with a blank href; attempting to set the href always causes Amaya to spontaneously exit instead without saving your changes for some stupid reason (see first bug above). * A lot of standard interface conventions are violated, besides the drag and shift click oddities already mentioned. For instance, alt + f + s doesn't save the document; it merely pulls down the file menu and highlights "Save" without actually executing the menu item! * It is impossible to insert a P element between an IMG tag and an immediately following HR, nor is it possible to insert text after such an image in its paragraph, before the HR. You have to delete the HR to insert into the image's paragraph after the image or to insert a new P immediately after the image. Then add back the HR. This seems to be true in the structure view and in the WYSIWYG view. * The WYSIWYG view isn't. Specifically, set an image to have the attribute align=left. Type some text or add HRs and other stuff after the image. Amaya 2.0a renders as though the align=left isn't there. However, if you display the page in Internet Exploder, the effects of the align=left are easily seen. * A lot of mathematical symbols are conspicuous in their absence from the symbol palette. Even ones that are definitely supposed to be a part of MathML. * ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com
Received on Friday, 11 June 1999 03:41:21 UTC