- From: Daniel Hernández <daniel@degu.cl>
- Date: Wed, 28 Dec 2011 11:30:16 -0300
- To: www-amaya@w3.org
I think that for some uses Amaya is the best HTML document editor. The advantage as HTML editor is that you can organize your documents in a non hierarchical way, navigate across them or share it with other people in the Web. That is better than editing single documents with OpenOffice. But it have some problems related with its architecture. The first problem is that in the Web we don't see documents as the building blocks for content. Even in content oriented CMS as Plone you see the emphasis in portlets and viewlets. That means that building blocks for sites are sub-documents that are combined and showed along the site. Also pages have more functionalities. You can filter documents by tags, select date ranges or find documents. That features are completely necessary for web sites today. I have wrote some sites using Amaya and running some scripts to reorganize documents, generate site structure and other thinks. Also I mix the static pages with content generated dynamically for some specific views. But it was to much work, and now I'm migrating sites to Plone. Now that I'm writing some documents in Plone I note that I really hate editing content in the Plone text editor and in any other web CMS. To edit documents Amaya is the best. Another interesting application to manage documents is Zim wiki. It is a desktop wiki that you can use to edit notes (as with Tom Boy) or to edit collaborative documentation using Bazar to manage versions and merge branches. I think that there are a lot of features of Zim that can be ported to Amaya. Some of them are: 1. Creating documents from links (as in a wiki). 2. Renaming or moving nodes updates all incoming references. 3. Attaching files also store that files. 4. Having several plugins. 5. Synchronization with versioning systems (now it only supports bzr). 6. Integrating several nodes in a same documentation project. I think that the most important difference between Amaya and other tools to develop content is the point 6. Amaya is a page editor. Zim and Plone are tools to develop sites. Today you need today a tool to develop sites, that means to edit several documents as a whole. I haven't see the code, but maybe the second problem is its monolithic architecture. It is necessary to get rid of the SVG editor for the core. We don't need to edit SVG in Amaya, we can do it in Inkscape, or other featured SVG editor. Maybe that kind of features must be implemented as plugins. I was experimenting with the Amaya template system, XTiger, and I have proposed an alternative template system in my engineering thesis. But now I think that we need tools to manage microformats in another Way. With XTiger microformats you have each document related with one template. Now that you needs is to write objects inside documents and that objects could be managed with several templates. This is the point where templates compete with JavaScript. In the current Web lot of content edition is made with JavaScript and server side processing. The question is: Where to implement that features? in a editor as Amaya or in JavaScript? You can implement several features of Amaya in JavaScript delegating the problem of rendering the HTML to common browsers, but in that case you lost the power to edit any document as you like, because the editor will be set in documents. For me the question is open. -- Daniel Hernández
Received on Wednesday, 28 December 2011 17:52:34 UTC