Re: amaya3.1 rendering and crashing problems

Vincent QUINT <Vincent.Quint@inrialpes.fr> wrote:

> 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 can understand why you made that design choice. It's a reasonable
choice to make, although it does mean that Amaya may never be
useful as a browser for anything other than demos and
browsing the W3C web site (it may still be useful as an editor, 
however). It would be nice, however, if Amaya recovered gracefully 
from bad HTML and limited its failures to simply bad rendering. 
I see no reason why Amaya should crash from bad HTML
(as it does on cnn.com for example).

[ . . . ]

> > 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?

Now it displays OK

[ . . . ]

> > 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.

Now this one does not display anything at all. I wonder if 
performance is degrading over time (the longer Amaya is
running or the more bad HTML it displays, the more things
break)?

Lorrie

Received on Friday, 30 June 2000 08:40:20 UTC