items re Amaya 8.8.51

If you ever update 8.8.51 for Win98 and/or if these
are relevant to your later-platform version, here are
critiques:

1. I look forward to complete compliance, although I
assume that's difficult. I'm trying to find full
support for ACSS or SSML so I can test my new pages,
and so other browser makers will be inspired to follow
in your footsteps. But I know that's a lot to ask.

2. During startup, the status bar says "Finished!".
The time to say that is when it has executed
everything, including loading the default home page,
and is ready for the next input. Likewise when
"Finished!" is displayed at times other than startup.
Otherwise, I think I can do the next step, when I
can't.

3. A progress bar for page loading would be useful. It
took about 10-14 hours to partly load a 100K page of
XHTML with no scripts and only minutes of multitasking
but lacking alt attributes for many <img> tags (the
text rippled every few minutes and shorter pages took
a lot less to load). Loading was necessarily by
forcing a character coding, ISO-8859-1, the same
coding declared inside the file. Loading may or may
not have finished; the screen saver was still not on
after 14 hours. I ended the task, restarted Amaya,
reopened the document, and noted that after it loaded
the text above the fold (quickly above the fold) it
then wrote each <img> tag (probably all defective in
lacking alt attributes because the images are
essentially invisible to users, being paragraph
spacers). Each of these <img> tags took roughly 5-6
minutes to write (it paints <img> tags in 2 passes but
the first pass may be quick before it unpaints them
and paints them again). There should be 138 of the
tags, which comes to roughly 11 1/2 hours to closer to
14 hours. I don't know if anything else has to be
written or calculated after the <img> tags that would
add notable time. The machine has adequate RAM, 64MB,
unless Amaya has special requirements I missed, so a
time estimate would be helpful for a long file.

4. The list of errors is incomplete. Fixing one error
may lead a new one to appear, not caused by the fix.
Apparently, the culprit is "mismatched tag". In one
instance, it reported </div> as an error (probably as
mismatched tag). That's fine, and I added the opening
tag and saved (ignoring earlier errors); but then I
closed the source code and error windows and reloaded
the page (forcing 8859-1) and it reported a bad token
several lines after the </div>, a token it hadn't
mentioned the first time. If the W3C philosophy is to
stop reporting errors until some others are fixed,
this impedes page design if we opt to code a spot a
certain way or can't identify the bad coding suggested
by the errors list but want to know of other errors
below it. I understand that tags that are not
understood by a user agent are to be ignored, and
meseems that an extra opening or closing tag should
simply be ignored.

5. The "mismatched tag" error may refer to an error in
tagging nested within. I had text within an invisible
table cell, thus I had "<td> . . . <p> . . . . </p> .
.. . </td>, except that I was missing the closing </p>.
However, Ayama instead reported </td> as mismatched.
Likewise, when Amaya reported </span> as a mismatched
tag, I was actually lacking </abbr> within <span> . .
.. <abbr> . . . </span>. Perhaps there's a better way
for Ayama to report the inner tagging as erroneous.

6. I've also seen a "mismatched tag" error at </td>
when I couldn't find an error. Within that table cell,
I had a large volume of text, in one case as a single
<p> . . . </p> enclosing several <br /> tags.
Likewise, a </p> was reported as mismatched, but I
couldn't identify what was allegedly missing, all the
enclosed tags being matched, apart from one <br />,
which isn't supposed to be.

7. In one instance, I suspect "mismatched tag"
referred to a nonstandard attribute in the opening
tag. The attribute, profile="[value]", is given by the
Dublin Core organization's website and is useful, so
I'll continue using it.

8. I've crashed it a few times via alt-space-x, which
should maximize the window via the menu at the left
end of the title bar, and once with just alt-space (I
was going to test another command by keyboarding but
didn't get a chance before the crash). That menu works
fine via the cursor, the maximize button works, and
alt-space-x works on Notepad. The crash symptom is the
standard warning about the program having committed an
illegal act and being shut down.

9. It crashes when (a) the main window was moved (so
the maximize button could be reached) and maximized by
the maximize button, (b) a file is being displayed,
(c) its source code is open and maximized by the
maximize button or is closed after being open, (d) its
parsing error list is open or closed as long as there
was a parsing error list and it was open, (e) I go to
the main window, and (f) I select another file and
click the dialog button to open it. (The file likely
would have had to be opened by forcing character
coding ISO-8859-1; that step would've been next.) The
window turns unavailable, alt-tab does nothing, and
clicking on menus or the close button yields only a
click sound. The end-task dialog lists it but does not
claim that it is not responding. I end the task and
start Amaya again. However, if I had closed both the
source code and the parsing errors list before opening
a new file, I can proceed. Recapping regarding the
child windows, either one or both being open leads to
the problem, but if both are closed before trying to
open another file the problem does not follow. On the
other hand, if I edit the source code and save it,
closing the child windows is not necessary to seeing
the revised object-code page.

10. It reports "&" in a name attribute value as an
invalid token and not well-formed, but not
consistently. In one value, it reported the second "&"
but not the first (they were nonconsecutive); in
another, it skipped the "&" altogether but reported a
similar error at the end of the name value, where I
could not identify a nonalphabetic character or a
wrong kind of quotation mark.

11. When forcing a character set is required, I'd like
to know which character/s offended Amaya or if my
UTF-8 declaration was misworded or inconsistent with
file content (Amaya refuses an attempt to force as
UTF-8 and prefers that I force as ISO-8859-1).

12. The Yahoo email login page (http://mail.yahoo.com)
is mangled in Amaya. Maybe their page is nonstandard,
and Yahoo doesn't support Amaya, but the page was so
mangled I switched browsers. I'll use Amaya for page
trials, since it looks good for that purpose.

13. I assume page rendering is not meant to implement
all the coding, in order for Amaya to serve its
purpose as a test bed for other aspects. Type size
from CSS, for example, is not rendered. If that's
intentional, it's not a priority for me, since other
browsers can be used to test that aspect.

14. A minor convenience would be an alt-character
choice for Force a Character Coding.

I'm running it on Win98SE on a Compaq Armada 7800
model 6300/T/8000/V/0/1 with 64MB RAM and the
resolution at 1024x768.

-- Nick

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Received on Monday, 19 June 2006 09:18:47 UTC