Bugs in Amaya 2.0a

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