Slashdot Mirror
W3 Releases Amaya 4.0
Death of Rats writes: "The World Wide Web Consortium has just released Amaya 4.0. Its a browser/development tool that is designed to test the functionality of new specs in a practical environment. Essentially, it is the client-side counterpart to Jigsaw. The new version should be pretty good, and there are binaries for Unix and Win32." I've been trying Amaya once in a while for a long time. For all the hype about Mozilla, konqueror and many others, it's interesting that the W3C's effort should get so little attention. One notable feature is that it completely integrates the page creation and page viewing aspects, though you might not see a lot of the Flashy features you'd like in a browser -- Amaya is stubbornly (or appropriately) "correct" in its adherence to W3C standards.
Well.. I just dowloaded the latest version, and it does'nt seem to work really well at all.. I have just recently started using Konqueror as my main browser because Netscape is just so useless, and M18 looks like it's heading the same way, slow and bloated.
I tried www.cnn.com (horribly broken) www.echofactor.com (crashed amaya completely)
www.slashdot.org (page looks nasty, and didnt realy work)
I mean is this meant to be a version 4.0 release or what? try 0.04 maybe.
I guess it will give support for some of the more interesting things like MathML, so I guess it has it's place, but it has a long way to go yet. It's difficult to test a webpage, if it crashes the browser!
Everyone is living in a personal delusion, just some are more delusional than others.
There have been quite a few posts asking about standards and whether they're worth it. A lot of the issues are summed up here:
http://www.anybrowser.org/campaign/
Basically, by not sticking to standards you are discriminating and losing money. It might cost you five minutes more to write a page but you could gain more customers or even save a long court battle.
Think of everyone, not just the majority.
Sorry, but I am going to categorically disagree.
Sometimes its nice having an accelerator. Frontpage does that for me. I do webdesign during my professional job, AND for my at-home business, and for both, I use frontpage.
It allows me to create a website MUCH faster than I could in notepad, and allows me to quickly flesh out the ideas I have. Once that is done, I go through and HTML validate, and clean it up.
Swiss army knives are great to cut through the thick plastic before you can GET to the nut, that needs to be turned by the monkey wrench.
Dont get me wrong, hand-coding is definitely a 'better' way to do things, but I bill by the hour, and dont have time to screw around. It works, and its fast, and its code isnt really all that bad. In fact, compared to dreamweaver, its almost sexy code.
Remember, there are appropriate tools for EACH situation. Dont grab a hammer and think that everything is a nail.
GPL'd web-based tradewars themed space game
I know that MacOS is a bitch to write applications for, but still it's a shame there's no MacOS port. There are many web development/design shops that use Macs at a number of points in their development process. Of course, any self-respecting web company would have both Macs and PCs around for testing, but you tend to use a tool much less frequently if you have to switch to another computer to do it.
Do domain names matter?
Well, I used it for 1 minute, so I figure I am informed enough to comment on slashdot now. :)
First, its scrolling is crap. Load up www.cnn.com and scroll up and down a few times, and fear in utmost horror.
Next, load up our favorite site, slashdot.. sigh.
My business website, painstakingly html-validated (ON THEIR VALIDATOR!!) doesnt even render right. (www.psychasia.com -- drill down thru webhosting or colocation).
You HAVE to enter http://, it doesnt support frames AT ALL (thats not a standard!?!?), and most importantly of all, it renders SLOWLY.
What in the hell?!?!
GPL'd web-based tradewars themed space game
I don't think it's as obvious as you say. "http://slashdot.org:80/story/" , "http://slashdot.org:80/story", "http://slashdot.org/story/", "http://slashdot.org/story", "slashdot.org/story/", "slashdot.org/story" . I don't think it's obvious which of those are conforming URLs, unless you've read the RFC (in fact, the :80 is optional and meaningless (i.e. default behaviour), and the trailing slash is optional but meaningful).
In the real world there are many people who've learned about HTML and the WWW by observing how it works only. If you learn that way, there's no way to distinguish between "what is correct" and "what the software allows you to do". For example, Windows allows you to write IP addresses with trailing zeroes, for example '064.028.067.048' instead of '64.28.67.48'. On the other hand, if you try to do this with some versions of ifconfig(1), then they will interpret part of the numbers in *octal*, and assume that you mean '42.28.45.48'. I've no idea which is the correct behaviour, or if both are, because I've only learned how to do this by using the software. If I wrote software which imitated one of those behaviours, then it could well be wrong.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
Definitely/A& gt; slashdot.
It works allright, she uses it successfully for most purposes, but that's because she writes relatively simple pages. But then, if everybody wrote simpler pages, the web would be a better place, wouldn't it? :-)
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
There's no "conspiracy" against Amaya. Amaya's always been an unusable testbed. Jigsaw is a tool for experimenting with server architecture and modularity and isn't meant for actual production use. Amaya is a tool for testing proposed new versions of CSS, HTML and especially nowadays the HTTP protocol. Nobody involved with the project expects anyone to really use it as a browser or an editing tool.
(Timothy, what do you know anything about?)
A lot of people are complaining that Amaya isn't as nice or as comfortable as Mozilla or IE. These people are missing the point of Amaya.
Amaya isn't supposed to replace your current web browser, it's a reference implimentation. Its goal is to show how a web browser should render a page. The idea is that if Amaya renders your web page correctly, then your HTML is Correct(tm).
If you don't understand why web standards are important, check out the Web Standards Project.
--
Why can't I moderate something "Wrong" or at least "Grossly Misinformed"?
Cos the job of Amaya is not to save 0.7 seconds of typing. It is to allow more people to use open, interoperable standards instead of proprietory HTML tags. If you emit the http:// from a URL, then it is no longer a valid URL.
You could argue that "everybody knows that www.w3c.org means http://www.w3c.org". That's true. Except that some programmer will assume that therefore "www.w3c.org" is a valid URL, and he will break interoperability between his program and another program which is expecting a real URL. If Amaya's job is to be strictly correct, then it must do this for URLs too.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
That's probably the most important thing about it. You look at most web sites these days, the HTML is absolutely horrible. Even I do horrible stuff in HTML, although I try my best not to.
If all browsers were such sticklers, we'd have a much faster-seeming internet, as all webmasters would have to make sure what they did was proper.
If only society worked the same way.
Chris 'coldacid' Charabaruk Meldstar Entertainment
That is untrue because everyone wants to get onto the XML bandwagon. XML, and all the accompanying technologies (such as XML Schema and XML Linking) provide a standard, open way of storing and manipulating data which is far more powerful than, say, SQL. IE-only web pages may work today, but most organisations who want to do any serious content management are at least considering XML-based systems for the future, and so XHTML-compliant web pages will be a no-brainer once browsers start to support XHTML fairly well (which is basically true of IE 5.5 and Netscape 6).
Not long ago I would have agreed with your view that the W3C was becoming irrelevant. However, the stunt they have pulled with XML is extremely nice - pulling people towards a powerful open standard because it is powerful, open and standard :-)
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
it's interesting that the W3C's effort should get so little attention.
I agree with you Timothy. But why isn't slashdot doing it's part and using *correct* HTML. Or at least have a "proper HTML only" version to show standards support.
A little Hypocritical, don't you think?
It doesn't seem to render Slashdot correctly. I wonder which is at fault, Slashdot or Amaya... Hmmm.... :)
Posted from the wireless couch.