A Few Comments on Amaya

Lately, I am having to use Amaya more and more, and in doing so, I
found that I had a few comments (quibbles first, then praise) in case
anyone is interested, arranged as important bugs (IBUG), bugs (BUG),
and features (FEATURE).

1) IBUG: It rearranges my code... this is very frustrating indeed, not
only because I like neat source code, but because (for example) if you
use <span> in <pre>, it messes up the whitespace. If I take the DTD or
the XML PI out, Amaya pops it straight back in. Maybe there is a
"preserve source code" feature in there somewhere... if so, then I
think it should be turned on as a default setting - why would anyone
want it messing about with their code (unless the code was wrong)?

2) IBUG: One of the WCAG techniques is to use <map> to group HyperText
links [1]... and yet Amaya does not seem to display <map> even when it
is used in this way.

3) IBUG: Selecting text in the main or source windows is staggeringly
slow... sometimes it seems to rescan the whole lot one line at a time.
I do a lot of selecting / copying / pasting and so on, so this is
particularly annoying. [I know that I could use shift+left click, but
this doesn't seem all that intuitive to me - I want it to select
properly when dragging].

4) IBUG: Temporary redirects or "Found" should have the original URI
displayed, not the new one [2]! This is an impotant Axiom: do not
treat HTTP temporary redirects as permanent redirects. Also, when
Amaya is used to link to this file, the first URI should be used, not
the temporary one.

5) BUG: Line breaks are represented strangely in the output: if viewed
in notepad it shows up as little squares, although wordpad shows them
O.K. This is probably some whitespace programming hack, but it just
niggles me.

6) BUG: Why is "information type" under the style menu? Semantic
elements under style?? I think that they should be under "types",
would be more appropriate.

7) BUG: The latest build (see below for my version details) crashes an
awful lot. For example, it crashed when selecting to enable a
stylesheet, it crashed when synchronizing the source, it crashed when
spellchecking a large document... That's fairly unaviodable, but what
is aviodable is crashing when browsing. Why oh why can't Dave
Raggett's HTML Tidy be built into it somehow? Yes, this would slow the
page rendering times down, but I'd rather have slow pages than no
pages.

8) BUG: It seems difficult/impossible to add rel/rev attributes to <a>
after creating the link.

9) BUG: It gives phantom parsing errors, such as "line 696, char 12:
not well-formed" - this particular document only had 695 lines in it,
and was indeed well formed XML.

10) BUG: Why doesn't "show targets" tell you what that target is?

11) BUG: Sometimes "replace and add to dictionary" doesn't addthe word
to the dictionary in the spellchecker (I haven't verified this fact),
and the spellchecker itself is very buggy: e.g. it puts a dummy
character in front of any first sentence word in a <pre> section, and
suggests you correct it. Annoying if you have a large <pre> section.

12) FEATURE: It automatically adds "made by Amaya" meta tag at the
top. Can we have an RDF verson of this?

13) FEATURE: Annotations; it would be nice to be able to annotate the
document itself with RDF if you control it, or possibly link to them
with a "rel" - i.e. "these are annotations that the author has made".

14) FEATURE: Why is there no "right click" menu feature, with items
such as "copy shortcut", and so on? I presume that'll be a WAI issue,
but it wouldn't be all that difficult to program a keyboard
equivalent.

15) FEATURE: Is there anyway to use a file on hard drive as a
template? For those of us who can't install template servers... I
presume that I could just edit the temple files in the Amaya
directory, but what if I wanted to use a file elsewhere - on my home
server for instance.

Some of these gripes will most likely have very simple answers that I
have just overlooked, but I hope that some will aid development.

For the record, I'm using Amaya V4.3.2 on Windows 98, which didn't
have the cleanest install in the world...

As for the good stuff... well the best feature is that to link to
another page, you can simply select the text, click "link" and then
click on the page in question - very much like the ol' original
WorldWideWeb browser. I like the "PUT" fuction as well, especially now
I've managed to get a PUT scipt to work on my server. I suppose there
are lots of good features really, like mandatory alt text, and
difficult to find formatting elements.

Apologies if some of this stuff has come up before, or if any of this
taps a recurring theme.

[1]
http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/NOTE-WCAG10-HTML-TECHS-20000920/#group-bypas
s
[2] http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/UserAgent and
http://www.w3.org/TR/cuap.html#protocols (3.4):-
3.4 Do not treat HTTP temporary redirects as permanent redirects.

--
Kindest Regards,
Sean B. Palmer
@prefix : <http://webns.net/roughterms/> .
:Sean :hasHomepage <http://purl.org/net/sbp/> .

Received on Monday, 2 April 2001 21:49:02 UTC