Re: Public Development of Amaya

On Tue, 12 Jan 1999 jose.kahan@w3.org wrote:

> Hello Ewan,
>  
> > I have yet to find a low-cost graphical browser available for Linux that
> > I consider satisfactory in use.  However, Amaya is the closest I have come
> > to that and I am willing to spend time on Amaya's development to bring it
> > up to scratch.
>  
> Sounds good. What is your wish list of things to improve?

For me, it is very unstable.  I've yet to spend time figuring out what the
problem is, but I get "Thot: Unrecoverable error" a great deal.  This
seems to happen a lot when switching from browsing locally to browsing
externally.  It also seems to happen when I have been browsing a few pages
to which Amaya does not like the syntax (lots of "Unexpected end tag" and
"Thot tool kit error: element does not match DTD").  I would like to
investigate that first and foremost.

Secondly, I would like to bring Amaya's MathML display up to scratch.
There are features missing - it would be nice if Amaya supported content
tags, but I see that that could be a long job and I am not in such a rush
for those.  I have had trouble using <mfenced open="|"> or <mfenced
open="&VerticalBar;">.  What I want is for the expression to have vertical
bars around it, indicating modulus or determinant.  No matter what I
tried, bars were not displayed.  In fact, nothing was displayed.  I would
like to investigate this also.

Other things to do with the maths display could be better.  For example,
the expression
      a
y = - -
      b
tends to be rendered so that the minus sign is connected to the line of
the fraction, making the two indistinguishable often.  This should be a
very easy thing to fix.

Also annoying are the missing entities, especially when they could
easily be mapped to similar glyphs if the appropriate one is unavailable;
I seem to remember having problems with "prime" in the past, and I think
&it; was coming out as an integral sign instead of "InvisibleTimes".  I
would be able to fix these as and when I came across them.

> I'd suggest you try to coordinate with the Amaya team to avoid the
> duplication of work. Feel free to contact any of us.

A problem I have is that, being a student, I am often very busy for
weeks at a time.  I would not like to put my name to a particular feature
or bug-fix, as I could never guarantee when I would have time to work on
it.  I would prefer to be a "fringe" developer most of the time,
submitting only small patches when I run across a little problem (such as
the entities mentioned above).  I will of course co-ordinate with others
before I undertake large bug-fixes or add new features.

My machine is available for testing; I could use pre-release versions of
Amaya in my day-to-day work without the unstability being too much of a
problem.  CVS access would be useful here, as I could easily follow
development quite closely.

> > Whether or not Amaya is to be openly developed, anonymous CVS (or similar)
> > access to the Amaya source would be useful.  This would allow
> > incremental source downloads, reducing download cost and load on your
> > server.  Is such access available?
>  
> We're starting work on opening our Amaya CVS base to the public.
> In a first time, it'll have world read-only access. This should take place
> in one or two months. Depending on the response and on the quality of
> contributions, we may open a write access to other people afterwards.

The read-only access is exactly what I was after.  This would be great.

I shall soon be getting the latest (1.4?) release, at which point I shall
see if the stability has improved.  I shall then see what time I have
available to offer for development (I get my timetable today :-).

Many thanks,

Ewan Mellor.

Received on Tuesday, 12 January 1999 05:27:55 UTC