- From: Vincent Quint <Vincent.Quint@inrialpes.fr>
- Date: Sat, 01 Feb 2003 12:15:07 +0100
- To: Marcy Wagners <marcywagners@yahoo.com.hk>
- Cc: www-amaya@w3.org
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