RE: Bug reports . . . 17 of them . . . .

Apologies for repost of original; Send is too close to Message in
Outlook....

	[ To avoid confusion, I'm not affiliated in any way with the
	  Amaya team. ]

	> attracted by an open-source WYSIWIG HTML editor - and Amaya is the
	> only one.  I could pay a few hundred dollars for a commercial
editor,

	I doubt that Amaya is funded on this basis, although maybe many
	of the people involved sympathise with it.

	> 14 - Without applying any attributes for vertical positioning
	>      of text within a table cell, Amaya displays them as being
	>      to the top, whilst in fact there is no attribute, and 
	>      Netscape displays the text in the centre of the cell.

	In this case, the defaults are not centring, but, the
	user supplied style and in default the browser supplied
	style.  Generally HTML is not a layout control language
	(use PDF of postscript for that), although, by fully 
	specifying a style sheet you can go part way (users are still
	allowed to override the style sheet and browsers are not 
	required to implement every feature - even IE4 allows 
	features to be disabled - see the accessibility options).

	>      Then I added some text in the middle of this, selected it and
	>      tried to make it 12 point Times, not bold or italic.  The
	>      results look fine on Amaya, but both Netscape 4.6 and
	>      MSIE4 display the Times text in bold.  I have enclosed this
	>      file as a demonstration - bug2.html.  Also, a simpler 
	>      deliberate example of it is in that file.

	You had generated an element SPAN with a CSS attribute style. You
need to
	take a software which supports CSS to see the result.

	Moreover, the published terms of reference for Amaya are that
	it is a test bed for HTML 4.0 and style sheets; the HTML 3.2 
	physical layout features are deprecated in HMTL 4.0 (rightly
	so - I think the big two lost the focus of HTML badly on this
	issues - if you want a DTP language, use one, don't just try
	to change the current fashionable language into something it was
	never supposed to be when there are better, but less fashionable
	alternatives (this of course is wishful thinking, all software
	languages, file formats, etc, start focussed and then expand to
	do everything)).

	Even SPAN STYLE is bad style; it means that you are not really 
	thinking about the document structure; you should use classes and
	a separate style sheet.  If you are creating an information page,
	rather than an advertising page, you will almost certainly get
	things across better by appropriate use of STRONG, EM, and Hn,
	and let the user choose the rendering style.


	>      The problem is that Amaya turns on boldface with a "span
style" 
	>      command of "font-weight: bold" and then expects to be able to

	>      specify non-bold in a subsequent "span style" command which 
	>      includes "font-style: normal".

	I think you mean nested, not subsequent.  SPAN has a mandatory
	closing tag and the style will be popped when that is encountered.
	(A common HTML error is to treat TAGs as turning on and off
	features, but not as representing structure, with the result
	that they are often not nested properly.  Such HTML won't validate,
	and XML is meaningless without proper structure.

Incidentally, Netscape 4.x is rather out of date in standards conformance.
Netscape 5 
will probably over take IE, though.

[ Formatting may be broken because of save and restore in Outlook ]

Received on Friday, 11 June 1999 10:10:54 UTC