Amaya freezes system -- Amaya's official response

Dear friends:

I am taking the liberty of sharing with list members Vincent Quint's
response to my original "Amaya freezes system" letter of yesterday. My
thanks to him for his help and insight. I am looking forward to Amaya
2.1.

Benjamin

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: URGENT! Amaya freezes system!
Resent-Date: Tue, 22 Jun 1999 04:50:29 -0400 (EDT)
Resent-From: www-amaya@w3.org
Date: Tue, 22 Jun 1999 10:50:16 +0200
From: Vincent Quint <quint@w3.org>
Reply-To: quint@w3.org
To: Benjamin Sher <sher07@bellsouth.net>
CC: AMAYA <www-amaya@w3.org>

Benjamin Sher wrote:

> First, my urgent need has to do with the fact that when I try to access
> one of my URL's, Amaya freezes every time, necessitating a
> Cnt-Alt-Backspace on my KDE. In fact, the first time, it refused to even
> return me to the console and I had to literally power off and reboot. I
> have in mind the following site:
> 
> http://www.websher.net/inx/link.html

When parsing this page Amaya enters an infinite loop. It tries to
recover from HTML errors, but the structure is so weird that it gets
completely confused.  The worst cases are missing or erroneous </font>
closing tags.  The first few lines of this page contain a number of such
cases, including tags like </FONT color=#000080 size="3"> (don't repeat
attributes in the closing tag).

Being an editor, Amaya tries to fix the document structure if there are
errors. Otherwise, it could not edit the document properly, as most of
its actions are based on the document structure.

If you want your pages to be readable not only by IE or NN, but by any
HTML browser, they have to be valid.  Use a HTML conformamt editor like
Amaya to create your pages.  Discard editors that produce invalid
markup.
Refer to the HTML specification when you write HTML "by hand":

   http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/

and validate your pages, for instance with

   http://validator.w3.org/

(Change at least the DOCTYPE declaration before validating your russian
index, as this declaration is wrong and confuses the validator).

> In addition to this urgent problem, there are a number of other
> anomalies that need explanation:

Here are some explanations:

> 1) All of my directory files on www.websher.net (except for the Index)
> are CENTERED. Yet, Amaya refuses to recognize the centering: the text in
> every department of my site appears left-aligned. 

In the following situation:

     <h3><center>WELCOME:</CENTER></H3>

Amaya ignores the <center> tag as it is not valid within a h3 tag.
You should write the opposite, h3 within center:

     <center><h3>WELCOME:</h3></center>

> 2) None of the images show up. Instead, they appear correctly centered
> but grey.

We have discovered a bug with jpeg images.  This bug has been fixed in
version V2.1 wich will be released this week (Thursday at the latest).

> 3) When I try to bring up any of my files from my LOCAL repository on my
> computer, the file appears blank.

I have no explanation for that one.  Could you send me such a file, or
an URI?

Thanks for your report.

Vincent.
-------------------------------------------------------
Vincent Quint                       INRIA Rhone-Alpes
W3C/INRIA                           ZIRST
e-mail: Vincent.Quint@w3.org        655 avenue de l'Europe
Tel.: +33 4 76 61 53 62             38330 Montbonnot St Martin
Fax:  +33 4 76 61 52 07             France
-- 
Benjamin Sher
sher07@bellsouth.net
Sher's Russian Web
http://www.websher.net

Received on Tuesday, 22 June 1999 21:08:08 UTC