Hari's Corner

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Amaya - W3C's official web browser and editor

Filed under: Software and Technology by Hari
Posted on Fri, Jun 22, 2007 at 13:37 IST (last updated: Thu, May 7, 2009 @ 21:19 IST)

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Amaya, W3C's web official cross-platform browser and XHTML editor recently made it to the Debian repositories. I was curious about this little application because it is actually a pretty neat WYSIWYG editor that produces clean, fully standards-compliant code. And it's only one of the few editors I've come across that allows you to create XHTML 1.0 (Transitional and Strict) as well as XHTML 1.1. Being W3C's own browser, one would expect it to be fairly up-to-date in standards compliance.

Amaya Screenshot

Like all WYSIWYG editors though, it has its drawbacks. CSS editing is a chore and you might as well use a text editor to do it and save plenty of time. Using inline style attributes for elements is possible with the built-in CSS dialog box, but I don't recommend that approach since it makes styles unwieldy, hard to re-use and difficult to manage. Unlike a lot of other HTML editors, Amaya makes it easy to use DIV elements for layout and it has an option to display the document structure clearly. However, navigating within nested elements in the document can be a bit of a pain because the cursor almost never seems to move where you want it to. It also seems to be prone to crashes so I recommend saving documents frequently.

I had a bit of fun playing around with Amaya. It certainly appears to be feature rich but all said and done, I'll probably stick to Quanta Plus for my serious web editing and development needs. But for those of you who aren't keen on messing with raw code and need a WYSIWYG editor that conforms to cutting edge web standards, Amaya is a good option.

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4 comment(s)

  1. I unfortunately stick to the raw code in vi or vim nowadays :)

    Comment by drew (visitor) on Tue, Jun 26, 2007 @ 22:40 IST #
  2. I stick to raw coding too, Drew, but what intrigued me about Amaya was that unlike other WYSIWYG editors Amaya actually produces clean code fully XHTML-compliant. Not surprising, since it's W3C's own browser. ;)

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on Tue, Jun 26, 2007 @ 23:05 IST #
  3. Yeah, I agree. You'd think everyone that develops a WYSIWYG editor would stick to the standards but I guess everyone wants to be different. I wish browsers stuck to standards as well, Opera does the best job. I think if browsers stuck to standards on a strict level, then people would code to such standards since their pages would all be broken and useless.. ;)

    Comment by drew (visitor) on Wed, Jun 27, 2007 @ 18:11 IST #
  4. Yes, I know about that. Opera supports some advanced CSS features that Mozilla doesn't support as well.Amaya is a more a test-bed, but as an editor, it's quite cool.

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on Wed, Jun 27, 2007 @ 19:08 IST #

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