Re: Amaya: call for relauching the project ?

On 19-3-2014 11:24, "Martin J. Dürst" wrote:
> Hello Antoine,
>
> On 2014/03/19 18:21, HiddenId wrote:
>> Hi all,
>> If you like using AMAYA as I Iike it, shouldn't we try to relaunch 
>> its long term development, particularly, making AMAYA running better 
>> with current and future version of web browsers ?
>>
>> For sure, we know that neither W3C nor WAM INRIA deploy resource for 
>> AMAYA any more. As specified on AMAYA home web page "the application 
>> was jointly developed by W3C and the WAM project (Web, Adaptation and 
>> Multimedia)
>> at INRIA. It is no more developed."
>> However, if many of us email to W3C and INRIA decision makers, our 
>> encouragements to decide to maintain AMAYA as a permanent project to 
>> develop, should this have an positive impact for relaunching the 
>> project with permanent allocated resources ?
>> Would this help to relaunch AMAYA development ?
>> Freely,
>> Antoine
>
> Sorry to not be of much help, but please let me explain the situation 
> as far as I understand (as a former member of the W3C team).
>
> I like Amaya very much, too, and would be really delighted if 
> development would continue (restart). A student of mine about a year 
> ago also worked on adding HTML5 support to Amaya, her code is 
> available at https://github.com/ezura/Amaya/. There also seem to have 
> been others working on the code, see 
> https://github.com/w3c/Amaya/network or search for 'Amaya' on github.
>
> However, unfortunately, it's not just that the Amaya project at INRIA 
> is closed, but that its main developers and backers are retired. So 
> there's nobody at INRIA in a position to push Amaya development. Also, 
> INRIA being a research institution, simply adapting Amaya to newer 
> browsers may not be such an attractive project.
>
> Anybody is of course very welcome to continue to work on Amaya, 
> because it's all open source!

Good to see it is open source. It is sad but understandable that Inra 
stops the development. If there is a future for Amaya, I think it is as 
part of the next organisations:

  * Google and its summer-of-code to boost the development.
  * Sourceforge as that is where a lot (all?) small and beautifull
    developments are
  * As part of an other, larger product/project....

For the other projects, I think about a connection/combination with the 
small and beautifull wordprocessor AbiWord (www.abisource.com): For me 
as a user they both provide good basic edit fascilities without extended 
exotic features. Here amaya can be the html processor and provide the 
'under-water' screen, the most noticable feature of Amaya. Abi can 
provide the wisywig-interface and converters from and to other formats.

An other, maybe strange switch can be a connection to the Calibre, the 
e-book tool. This might be a little switch, as ebook formats are the 
base there, however, as far as I know ebooks, they have a lot in common 
with html.

Just my 2 cents,

Corné Beerse