{ /notes -> /notes/tech }

On Using Amaya

Amaya (source) is a WYSIWYG browser developed by the W3C as part of their LEAD software initiative. It's commonly use by the W3T, but I've never been a major proponent of it due to its many deficiencies, some of which I list below apart from the obvious highly shoddy UI.

I've raised comments before on www-amaya^{(footnote 1)}, which were kindly answered by Irène and by Chaals. I was finding Amaya very useful for editing extremely large documents such as XAG and EARL where counting nesting was getting rather difficult.

Annoyances

• When selecting text, it's not smooth: it jitters about.
• Likewise, when you extend a selection left of the screen, it unselects for some reason. It's better when you use the keyboard instead of the mouse, and I suppose that Amaya is rather keyboard oriented--that's a benefit in some respects.
• The font repertoire appears to be extremely limited, and the default font is miniscule. Better than the overly large default in most browsers, but...
• Default encoding is latin-1, which is crazy. utf-8 all the way--and make it easier to swap to default utf-8 mode.
• There's no obvious easy and intuitive way to enter utf-8 characters or generate entities. When I added a << and >> from phenny output, it seemed to insert the iso-8859-1 bytes, breaking the utf-8.
• Why isn't it using any doctype? Perhaps DanC convinced them at some point along the line to not use a doctype, or perhaps my asking it to use XHTML 1.0 all the time has set it to spite me. Some kind of auto-validation would be nice to some degree, but then Amaya keeps track of all that anyway so you'd expect documents to be neatly formed and, hopefully, valid if it can be bothered to use a doctype. I wonder how it coverts documents (if at all) between doctypes: call out to tidy routines or somesuch?
• Source editing should automatically synchronise with the document--or there should be a mode to enable you to do so.
• There's an option to automatically preserve window geometry (checked), and a button to save the geometry as it currently is manually (done). Neither work. Sigh.
• It's too easy to forget that the document has no title: it should probably prompt when you save, or have an option for doing so, if you've neglected to change it from the default of "No title".
• You can't select multiple list items by holding down Ctrl and clicking on the dots. Perhaps there's a way to do it properly from the keyboard.
• There's no easy way to move list items that have been selected up and down, as far as I'm aware. Up/down or any combination with shift and ctrl don't work, which is the obvious thing (ctrl+up and ctrl+down, I'd say, but they seem to be incremental scrolls instead).
• Selecting a whole load of text that includes a link and setting all of the text to be a link (i.e. increasing the extent of a link) doesn't do the obvious thing and "just work". Instead it does nothing. You have to get around it by inserting the caret at the end of the link and inserting some more text there, which is pretty inefficient.
• If you accidentally pull a paragraph back into a heading, BLAM. Then if you put it on its own line with some normal paragraph lines below it and try to ul it, it doesn't work--fairly understandably, I suppose.
• Doing return (new paragraph), Ctrl+h Ctrl+a (new <address> element) and then trying to start a link with Ctrl+l Ctrl+l brings up a really strange error message: "An anchor cannot contain these elements".
• Why does it give a ding when it loads some pages? Very annoying.
• When editing an existing document where, presumably, the character set is unknown, Amaya inserts the following meta element instead of just doing nothing: <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="">. Heh, on pasting that it's coloured it for me... reloading the page should fix that. Yep.
• Argh. How do I turn a paragraph into a division? I pasted some lines from IRC chatlogs, stripped off the timestamps manually (which was a bit of a pain because of the selection bug), then tried selecting them all and hitting div but that only put a div around them all. Then I tried putting a div inside a paragraph (which is illegal, so I figured it might correctly tell that I'm trying to turn the paragraph into a div instead), but it split the paragraph up into two and added a new div between. Selecting a whole paragraph and then trying to turn it into a div seems to do nothing at all.
• Is there no easy way to make a footnote?
• This displays with a subscript "1)"! ^{(<a href="#footnote1">1</a>)}
• Why, when in source view, do you have to press backspace twice to delete the last single character of the line? The line position indicator even says that you've removed two characters; perhaps it's thinking about the newline? But the newlines does not get removed.
• When you backspace a blank line in a <pre> section, it appears as though the caret is a space's length away from the last character on the line, e.g. "> |", whereas in fact it's positioned ">|"; this causes you to attempt to get rid of the space, and you delete the character you wanted to preserve by accident.
• In some context (@@ reproduce) a selected list's bullets look hollow, making it seem as though it's a list nested within a list. Only happens on selection, though.
• If you're in the middle of an <li>, e.g. "<li>First Item.|Second Item.</li>, and you try to put the second item into its own <li> by pressing enter the usual three times, what you get instead is a blank <li> inserted before the result, e.g. "<li>First Item.</li><li></li><li>Second Item.</li>".
• It doesn't think that XML documents that have doctypes with no SYSTEM identifiers are syntactically well formed... you have to remove the doctype altogether before it'll let you load the document as XML.
• Saving using PUT to Apache is buggy: when you save and then switch to a different page, Amaya gives a false XML parsing error until you refresh. Sometimes it'll display odd "page saved" messages at the top of previous saved documents too, but that also goes away upon a refresh.

All of these bugs and annoyances were found in Amaya 8.5 on WinXP.

@@ Find the message I sent to www-amaya quite a while ago enumerating a similarly large list of complains, bugs, and feature requests. Hmm, without knowing about shift+enter, turning an li into a paragraph is either difficult or impossible intuitively.

Good Things

• Copying and pasting lists does the right thing, as do the various levels of pressing return in lists. Pasting list items into list items does the right thing, as does selecting lots of lines of text and turning them into a ul--good stuff.

Amaya probably would've been a lot smoother if a) the W3C had devoted more people to its development, and b) it'd been non-LEAD software, i.e. if the main feature set had been consolidated instead of having had the Annotea, SVG, etc. features added.

Enabling PUT In Apace with mod_put

If you want to be able to put to your Apache server via HTTP in Amaya, then you'll either have to write a PUT handler of your own or enable mod_put. If mod_put is lying around, it's a lot easier to use it than rolling your own, though this is the first time I've used it instead of writing a PUT handler of my own.

This is what I added to my httpd.conf to get it working for this directory:

LoadModule put_module /usr/lib/apache/1.3/mod_put.so

<Directory /inamidst.com/notes>
   EnablePut On
   EnableDelete Off
   umask 007
</Directory>

I also made it so that POST and PUT have access control, but that's the easy part. Obligatory Apache Week article reference: Publishing Pages with PUT. The advantages of doing this were that:

• All links point to the right places. Since I'm using .html-less URIs, they don't work when browsing the local filesystem, but they do when served by Apache.
• Style shows correctly now that the link/@href attributes are pointing to stylesheets.

Bugs: you'll get a 403 Forbidden if you try to save to the root ./ directory entry. Workaround: use /index instead. It also seems that creating a new document gives a 403 error: you have to touch notes/pagename to get around that.

Other

@@ Macros? Inserting an address is a bit of a nuisance. Hmm... I suppose it isn't too bad: Ctrl+h Ctrl+a Sean B. Palmer Shift+Home Ctrl+l Ctrl+l http://inamidst.com/sbp/ Enter. It beats <address>Enter<a href="http://inamidst.com/sbp/">Sean B. Palmer</a></address> for keystrokes, but I'm more used to the HTML input. I like how I can type "<" and have it automatically quoted in Amaya though... Another good macro would be to insert the current date (and, optionally, time).

Here's what I'm currently using in my amaya.css:

/* This is the default Amaya CSS file */

body { 
   margin: 0.25em 1em; 
   font: 130% Georgia; 
}

h1, h2, h3 { font-family: "Gill Sans", sans-serif; }

pre { font-size: 90%; }

Footnote 1

Internal Server Error

The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator, webreq@w3.org and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

- a 2002/02/mid/ URI at W3C

referred to from a search for my old Amaya post.

@@ My default pwyky.css should should the @cite for blockquote[cite] but not for other blockquote elements.