Re: Rendering

Marcy Wagners wrote:

> But I myself also wonder what is the position of Amaya
> in the browser market and its future. I use Mozilla
> and it is a great browser, and it is open source.

I am not sure that the position of Amaya in the *browser*
market is a relevant issue. Amaya does not aim as becoming
the greatest browser on the Web. There are plenty of good browsers
over there, including open source software. I use Mozilla too,
and I like it for browsing the Web, but I don't use the Web only
for browsing, and when it comes to editing Web pages there are
much less nice tools. I mean tools that allow you to freely
create and publish valid pages with lots of links, SVG graphics,
mathematical expressions, style sheets, all those things that
the latest versions of browsers allow you to display.

> Amaya's target users are developers, web
> designers/programmers. Amaya does have some cool
> tools, but until it can render pages better, and
> becomes more stable, it's use is limited.

If you consider the Web just as a publication medium,
I can understand your point. In this view, there are
developpers/designers/programmers on one side and there
are readers/consumers on the other side. The former use
very tricky techniques and tools, the latter use browsers.
That's not my view. I consider the Web as a shared information
space where users not only consume information but also
produce and update information. That's Amaya's "market",
i.e. the market of collaborative tools. That's why a large
part of the efforts in Amaya are dedicated to editing complex
Web pages and style sheets, with an easy way to save them
remotely. That's why features like creating and using shared
annotations are added to Amaya.

> Is there in any way that Amaya can utilize some of the
> codes in other open-source browsers and give itself a
> leap in rendering ability, such as CSS, javascript,
> etc. ? Or join efforts with other open-source project ?

Sure! Amaya already uses a number of packages coming from
other open source projects, such as image libraries, libwww,
GTK (user interface), OpenGL, Raptor (RDF parser), Expat
(XML parser), etc. As for Javascript, this was not considered
as a top priority for an authoring tool. But, if time allows,
embedding an open-source Javascript engine could be considered.
In any case, such a piece of code would certainly not be
developed by the Amaya team. For CSS, the issue is a bit
different. Again, consider Amaya as an editor. Then, there
is a need for incremental formating and styling, and
interactions between the editor and the formatter (the CSS engine)
are a bit complex. This makes it difficult to integrate an external
piece of software.

> I understand that there are lots of loyalties and
> prides involved in this field. I don't want to offend
> anyone at all. I don't know anything about programming
> a browser. So this is just a thought coming from a
> "user" and a supporter of "open-source" and the
> "standards".

Thanks for your comments and support.

Vincent.

Received on Saturday, 1 February 2003 06:15:11 UTC