Re: Amaya

I am afraid the problems of Amaya are more serious than donate, or host 
it at SourceForge or elsewhere.

1. The objective to have the perfect WYSIWYG editor *and* the perfect 
compliant browser was not attained.

—1.a. It is a reasonable editor. I have been using it and I still 
sometimes do (in combination with Bluefish for the code). (For multipage 
projects, I write in TEI and generate the pages automatically with all 
hyperlinks.)

—1.b. It is a poor browser. It intends to be compliant, but it cannot 
display quite ordinary paragraphs: with a (reasonable) mixture of 
first-line indent, non-break spaces (I write in French), anchors and 
left-and-right justification, you would easily get wrong line cuts. I 
had not so few cases (that I sent to this list) of a wrong display for 
(correct) code that displayed without problem in Firefox.

—1.c. It may therefore be more realistic to develop Amaya as an editor 
only, and, as another project, fork Firefox or another good browser to 
make it a showcase compliant browser.

2. Amaya is based on a poor editor engine. It is awfully slow. If you 
move the cursor with arrows, you always get too far. It has poor 
selection capabilities (as from one word to many words) if you compare 
with, say, Bluefish (code only).

3. It does display a good lot of special characters and it writes the 
code in UTF-8, but it is not UTF-8 internally. It cannot display all of 
Unicode (even if you have the fonts installed) and it makes errors with 
some special characters in values of attributes. You cannot seriously, 
in the 21th century, develop a program to write UTF-8 XML, that is not 
itself UTF-8 inside.

4. The GUI is rather peculiar. You really have to get used to it. It 
does not resemble any other software.

Conclusion: I am not a programmer, just a user, but for the little I 
know, as I understand the situation, I am afraid that Amaya went as far 
as it could get, is in a deadlock and needs a complete rewrite, not just 
some maintenance or improvement.

(Please excuse my «international» English pidgin.)

-- 
Amitiés, Dominique,
dominique@d-meeus.be, http://www.d-meeus.be/
One upon a tom in a far off distant land far across the sea miles away 
from anyway over the hills as the crow barks 39 peoble lived miles away 
from anywhere on a little island on a distant land. (John Lennon, /In 
his own write 
<http://studies.d-meeus.be/wikindx3/index.php?action=resourceView&id=747>/, 
Jonathan Cape, Londres, 1964, p. 26.)