
Amaya: W3C's Web Editor (2012) - brudgers
https://www.w3.org/Amaya/
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adzicg
The last release was in 2012 - I'm curious why this made the HN home page. Am
I missing some important news?

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DanBC
It's a nice bit of history.

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brudgers
I've been thinking some lately about systems that express the idea of
programming as an ordinary computer use...systems that don't draw a
distinction between users and programmers...systems that don't distinguish
between programming them and using them. Earlier today, I was writing a demi-
argument in response to a complaint about Windows 10S not having the Linux
subsystem based on that idea and how it related to the replacement of
"programming" with "development" and part of that reply was enumerating
systems that treated "programming" like using.

That's when I remembered Amaya which I first stumbled across back in 2007 or
so when I was trying to figure out how to build a website for my practice
(pretend work that was easier than trying to dig up clients on the cusp of the
recession). What is interesting to me is how diverse browsers were in the days
before Chrome. The old Opera is another example of what a web browser could
be...or could have been.

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zmix
It could have all been so nice, if X(HT)ML would have found more support on
the client side, as well as on the httpd server side. I am thinking about
XIncludes, URL-endocded XPath and places like Wikipedia defining their own
namespaces.

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pjmlp
Fully agree, we could have had XAML for the web, instead of the Frankenstein
amalgamation some of us have to endure.

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zmix
You're being sarcastic, no? I am happy, that we do not have a Microsoft
format. I'd rather prefer XUL/XHTML.

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slim
Great tool. I used it intensively from 97 to 2006. It was the only tool
roughly equivalent to dreamweaver available for linux. Made me learn a lot
about w3c standards

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hilbert42
I remember Amaya very well and I was annoyed when the W3C ceased to develop it
further.

The big question is why the W3C failed to continue to develop it, as there was
(and still is) a big need for a good 'reference' HTML editor.

Another big question that has never been satisfactorily answered for me is why
most WYSIWYG HTML editors are so terribly—really horribly—bad[1]. One only has
to look at the code they generate even on the simplest of text to realize
this.

I think I've probably answered my own question here, in that the W3C couldn't
actually make a decent HTML editor—certainly not one that could produce good
reference code—so it just gave up!

Isn't it rather ironic that the very 'keepers' of HTML were unable to do this.
It seems to me this tells us a great deal about the intrinsic inadequacies of
HTML itself and I'm forever surprised there's very little ongoing debate or
complaint about it. Thus—in the absence of any such criticism—the W3C has
'forgotten' fundamental matters such as mark-up formatting (limitations
thereof, etc.) and is now more worried or concerned about keeping the Big End
of town happy with ancillary junk such as DRM.

____

[1] For example, take the terrible HTML editor in Thunderbird email, it's been
around for many years now and has had much time to evolve into a proper editor
but it's still essentially a joke when it comes to editing/producing good
HTML. It's open so anyone could have a go at fixing it (if it was easy to do
then by now presumably someone would have done so).

If you want proof of how bad it is then just install the ThunderHTMLedit add-
on which lets you view (then if you want edit) the editor's code. [For
instance, it cannot automatically concatenate multiple/repeated <xyz> </xyz>
\- type operations, which (along with similar elementary coding stuff-ups) I
often find myself manually having to clean up].

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digi_owl
Another aspect is that so much of the web these days is JS and CSS, with HTML
being a bunch of div tags that the former two latch on to.

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hilbert42
You're absolutely right of course. Even without JS, it's hard to think of a
system that could be messier and more convoluted than the way we now mark up
web pages. Not that this problem is unique to web pages, desktop publishing
and wordprocessors still have and have always had similar issues (similarly
the lack of coherent rules for cutting-&-pasting between pages generated by
different means—i.e.: the ongoing matter of formatting distortions, etc. after
pasting).

This has always seemed strange to me as you'd think that replacing handwriting
onto paper with a systematic standardised format/methodology for displaying
writing etc. onto computer screens/printers would have been considered one of
the most basic and fundamental tasks for computer solution but unfortunately
it's never been so.

Consider the following still-unsolved problem of writing (or annotating)
between the lines or in the margins of computer-generated text. Right, it's
dead easy to do if one wants to scribble by hand in the margins of a book or
on a sheet of paper, etc. but it's nigh on impossible to do it electronically.
(Given that we've now had electronic computers for some 70 or so years since
WWII, this, I reckon, is very strange indeed.)

___

 _Incidentally, I consider JavaScript an abomination (at least in web pages).
By default, JS is turned off on my browser and I only turn it on when strictly
necessary, which in practice is about 3% of web sites I visit. Moreover, sites
that require its use up front or refuse to display the primary /home page
without it are clicked-off as fast as my mouse-clicking reaction time is
(there's always a plethora of similar sites without such issues). This way, I
avoid the most egregious of the junk that often appears on web pages and my
browsing is very significantly faster (not to mention much more satisfying)._

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amelius
> Download Amaya binary releases

Isn't this the perfect type of application to run _inside_ a browser instead?

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dragonwriter
Now, sure; development on Amaya stopped in 2012, and it was started in 1996.

In 1996, it wasn't the kind of thing that you could do in any existing browser
particularly well.

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kbumsik
My professor suggested to use either Amaya or Adobe Fireworks in a web
programming class. I tried to use Amaya at first because it's free and open
source but I ended up using Fireworks...It's a bit shame that this kind of
project is abandoned.

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pjmlp
I remember using it quite often as HTML editor, long time ago.

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mac_graham
test

