Re: When will the next release be posted?

Hello all,
I'm not coder but I'm one of the happy Amaya users group.
The only thing I can do is to encourage you.
It will be so unbelievably great if all of what you mentionned could be done.
Again, from my point of you, Amaya is my preferred html /css editor.
Anyway again, thanks a lot to Irene, Vincent, Laurent, W3C, Inra and any else for the big job done and this very useful tool !!!
So freely,

Antoine



________________________________
 De : Frédéric WANG <fred.wang@free.fr>
À : laurent carcone <laurent.carcone@orange.fr> 
Cc : Stanimir Stamenkov <s7an10@netscape.net>; www-amaya@w3.org; Steven Pemberton <Steven.Pemberton@cwi.nl>; alfredovogel@gmail.com 
Envoyé le : Mardi 9 avril 2013 13h15
Objet : Re: When will the next release be posted?
 

On 09/04/2013 11:54, laurent carcone wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Indeed, there are no internal developments on Amaya currently. Irene and Vincent retired and both W3C and Inria stopped their involvment in the project. I work partial time at W3C but I have no assignment to work on new developments.
> Amaya has always been an open source project and I created a github repository [1] to get a broader audience.
> Some works have been done recently on HTML5 support, I hope to be able to integrate them and create a specific snapshot.
> But Amaya is a very complex project, used for both production and research purposes.
> As Stanimir said, the main problem is the rendering engine. Amaya uses it's own engine which is the most complex (and biggest) part of the code. I don't know this part very well and it would require a huge work to be able to maintain it. There was a project two years ago to work on the separation of the editor part and the rendering part and use Gecko for that, unfortunately this project didn't succeed.
> To my point of view, this separation is essential if we want Amaya continue to evolve, but as I said, it would require a lot of time. I can help on some points but cannot lead.
> Nevertheless, I'd like to see a first support of HTML5 on Amaya and I think it's possible with the work that has been done on it.
> 
> Regards,
> Laurent
> 
> [1] https://github.com/W3C/Amaya

Hi all,

Gecko C++ code has a rendering engine but also a core editor (the one used for example by Thunderbird or by the "contenteditable" implementation. See http://html5demos.com/contenteditable). This editor gives basic features like cursor navigation, entering text, selection, copy and paste etc Additionally, some projects (Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, KompoZer, BlueGriffon) add a user interface for more advanced operations like inserting an image, a link etc At the moment, it seems that there are not a lot of developments in the core editor, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey or KompoZer (because mostly done by volunteers) while BlueGriffon is actively developed by Daniel Glazman (but some of the features are proprietary extensions). I think Fabien Cazenave wanted to modify the Mozilla source to easily build a standalone editor (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=477845) and that he is willing to continue his KompoZer editor. I also believed he was hired by Mozilla
 to work on the editor at some point. However, I think he now works essentially on the B2G project (I think during a period he also worked at WAM, is related to the effort you are mentioning?)

So I'm wondering if Amaya should go further than just use the rendering engine by Gecko and also consider using its core editor. I did some experiments a long time ago and that seemed to work, I was able to get a program with the same UI as Amaya, that uses Gecko's layout engine and the core editor (I still have the code, but haven't tried to compile it with recent version of Gecko). But it remains to reimplement the whole Amaya UI (save menu, css editor, HTML/SVG/MathML palette etc) in XML+Javascript and perhaps contribute/modify Gecko's core editor. I agree that maintaining the old and huge Amaya code is probably impossible without Irène and Vincent's knowledge of the code. Personally I'd like to improve Gecko-based editors because Amaya does some things better (e.g. the navigation and copy and paste of MathML). I think if Amaya shares a base code with all the other Gecko projects, that would definitely help the maintenance. Also, working with
 XML+Javascript for the UI would be much convenient (for example to get contributions from people without knowledge of C/C++) and stable (Amaya has always had many crashes) .

-- Frédéric Wang
maths-informatique-jeux.com/blog/frederic