Re: amaya3.1 rendering and crashing problems

Lorrie Cranor wrote:

> I'm running Amaya 3.1 on Windows98 and have had frequent
> problems while browsing. Almost every web page I go to
> has problems being rendered.

The issue is that all these pages are non-conformant HTML pages.
We have tried to cope with some HTML errors in Amaya, but we
did not obviously address all possible errors. We could be
draconian, and reject any page that is not stricly valid, but
it would make Amaya almost useless, at least for browsing.
We then decided to address the most frequent and obvious
errors. The problem is that Amaya does not recover from those
errors in the same way as the most popular browsers do, because
recovery strategies are not specified anywhere and mimicking
Netscape or IE would be an endless task. We prefer to spend our
scarce resources to implement the W3C recommendations and to
encourage authors to follow the recommendations. That's why
we paid much attention to generate only valid documents
(well, there is no guarantee when you edit an invalid document).

The consequence of that option is that invalid documents often
look bad.

I just sent the URIs you tried to the HTML validator
    http://validator.w3.org/
Here are the results:

> For example:
> 
> http://www.cnn.com crashes Amaya when I scroll to the bottom
> of the page.

153 errors, including many missing tags.

> http://www.usatoday.com does not display properly

199 errors

> http://www.dash.com doesn't display anything

This page is actually empty. It only contains an element
<META HTTP-EQUIV="REFRESH" ...> which should not be used
according to the HTML specification:
http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/global.html#edef-META

> http://www.doubleclick.com displays all the elements on
> top of each other

76 errors, including some missing <TR> and <TABLE> tags.

> http://www.cfp2000.org displays two columns on top of each other

This one has only 8 errors and seems to display correctly
on my machine. Could you try again?

> http://www.acm.org displays two columnns and graphics on top
> of each other

53 errors, including missing <TABLE> and <TR> tags.

> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-amaya/ - if I do a search
> and then click the back button twice to come back here, the
> page no longer renders correctly (word wrap is very strange).
> Then if I go back again and then forward, Amaya crashes.

We will look into this one. This archive is valid and Amaya should
not crash.

Vincent.

Received on Friday, 26 May 2000 05:01:58 UTC