Re: A Few Comments on Amaya

Sorry for the delay, my mailer was out of service.

> 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)?

The support of preserve is in the todo list of Amaya.

> 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.

I know that problem. If you consider that it's important to support
that in Amaya we can change our priorities.

> 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].

We made some progresses in the last version, but Amaya is still redisplaying
too often.

> 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.

We'll check the specification.

> 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.

The problem comes here from notepad which needs the ^M to work correctly.
Our position is to not work differently on a Windows and on a Unix platform
(the Web should be platform independent).
Any modern Web tool is able to read a Web page without ^M.

> 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.

Because these tags work like a presentation style. There are toggles 
that set/unset the tag around the current selection. It's not the case
for other entries in the type menu.
 
> 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

I tested these functions on a Windows98 platform and they worked.
Could you send us a page that shows these crashes.

> 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.

We don't have the manpower to do that. This is listed in open projects
concerning Amaya (http://www.w3.org/Amaya/User/Stage.html).
Any contributor is welcome.

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

When the element <a> is selected, you can add this attribute.
To select an anchor you can select the text within the anchor then hit
the key F2.

> 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.

This bug is detected by Expat and I never saw this kind of bug. Are you
sure that all tags are correctly ended.
You can send us the URI if you don't find any cause of the error.

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

Show targets shows all elements that can be used as a target (anchors
with an attribute name, elements with an attribute id).

> 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.

It doesn't add words with special characters, but no problem with other
words. They are added to your private dictionary.DCT
The character newline is not interpreted as a separator by the spell
checker. This is a bug we'll fix as soon as possible.

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

Good idea.

> 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".

Probably yes.

> 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.

Our plan is to use the right button to open a linked page into a new
window.

> 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.

Not yet. See open projects (http://www.w3.org/Amaya/User/Stage.html).

> 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 Tuesday, 3 April 2001 10:35:43 UTC