W3 Releases Amaya 4.0 155
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.
Amaya... does it really work? (Score:4)
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!
Re:The W3C is irrelevant (Score:1)
The W3C is the lawmaker of the web, and if you don't like it, at least accept it.
I hope that makes sense.
Has the UI changed? (Score:2)
The problem is that in mandating that every single construction be inserted in a way that maintains the document status as "valid HTML," this leaves the problem that the UI has to build pages as a sort of "tree" into which you insert nodes. It may look "WYSIWYG," but the input side is hairy to actually use.
I mostly compose web material by writing DocBook [docbook.org] which then transforms to HTML; that provides quite decent guarantees of well-formedness and validity. Mind you, I start with something that may not be valid SGML.
It seems to me that a more usable approach, if composing HTML, is to write it however you like, perhaps a tad messy, and then use tools like Dave Raggett's HTML Tidy [w3.org] utility.
Amaya is well and interesting; I suspect that it is only of practical interest to people that are working specifically on HTML standardization, and of limited interest to anyone else.
Re:Egocentricity hurts the WWW foundation (Score:1)
would be great cannon-fodder for the appeal process if it was determined to be sending user info upstream without permission.
Re:nice looking ??? (Score:1)
The world is full of Motif applications, far more than any other UNIX GUI. Trust me, I've seen uglier.
Your prejudice is showing.
Re:No Unicode in Amaya (Score:2)
You miss the point. If the encapsulation of encoding information will be standardizes, all encoding-specific finctions will have to be written only once (by people who understand them), and then just reused with a simple library that can just dynamically load procedures for whatever encoding it encounters, as it will be able to get encoding names from the text. That can be easily extensible without any trouble -- as opposed to Unicode, where any kind of extension causes new incompatible version of the standard to be adopted.
Better yet, it will be safe to consider all unlabeled data to be "binary", and cause all software to preserve it in the unchanged form until someone will label it -- this will be of great help in situations where pieces of data have unknown language or can't be assigned any encoding and shouldn't be treated like a text in some language except by few programs that understand the meaning of that data. With mandatory Unicode someone has to assign nonexistent language to them to convert to Unicode at some point, thus risking that things will be distorted, as, say, data may look like valid (or invalid) UTF-8 yet be something else. With labeling it can be just labeled as data with no charset/encoding/language assigned, and all language-processing and protocol-related routines will just keep it unchanged.
Re:BAD xml standards have made the w3 MORE irrelev (Score:2)
You mean the people who were too smart to adopt DSSSL?? Have you ever seen the standard? I don't think there was ever a standard as universally trashed and quickly dismissed.
I nearly got into a FISTFIGHT with the Amaya folks (Score:2)
"You should make sure your output looks OK only in Amaya. By making it look right in Netscape and IE you're part of the problem"
I replied that if we made the output render correctly in Amaya and didn't care about any other browsers, nobody would buy our product because nobody uses Amaya!
He started SWINGING at me! After this, I never paied any attention to the W3C ever again.
Re:FrontPage? (Score:2)
No, I didnt miss the point. CSS doesnt provide an easy way to accomplish the task of having a size-locked table.
>looks like all every other all-graphics, designed for 640x480 webpages I have ever seen
Opinion. Most of the responses I have gotten are extremely favorable, and get me plenty of business.
>Try looking at that page on a 1600x1200 screen and see how "sexy" you think it looks.
I do everyday.
As to your validation, that is rather odd. I just did it myself again to make sure..
I had it validated earlier.. although I added in the comments.. I guess that'll learn ya, huh? Well, I will go fix it. Those are tiny mistakes anyways.. no big deal..
The point is that the code is damned good compared to 90% of the sites out there, and save 4 trifling little mistakes, (that just popped up), its valid code, ALL created by frontpage.
Its a valid tool, and a good one too.
Re:Wow! (Score:1)
Re:Standards -- why bother? (Score:1)
lets all go back to plain ASCII text (with ANSI colour for the rich people with colour monitors).
the lowest common denominator is why Windows is popular you know.
Re:mathML... Why can't it be like TeX? (Score:1)
Hrm, couldn't you just convert TeX output into PDF files and post them? Not really a great choice, but I don't think having TeX as a rendering engine would work well. Maybe just for math equations, but not for whole pages
Yes, TeX is a typesetting language, made for printing. Web pages are (supposidly) independant of sizes, fonts, colors, etc. In Tex you say {\it this is emphasized}. This specifies exactly what kind of font should be used. In html you say <em>this is emphasized</em>, and the renderer is basically told "I should emphasize this". Netscape uses italics, while an html to speach browser for the blind would, well, emphasize that text.
TeX is not html and html is not TeX. Both are meant for different things; TeX is about the final product (a printed paper), while html is about the source. I could do all kind of hacks in a TeX paper trying to get it to look just right, and my proff wouldn't notice in the final product. I could also set up tons of tables, images, frames, javascript, etc on a web page so that it looks just right on my web browser, but try to view it on another (or at a different screen resolution, or color depth) and it's brocken.
I'm all for using a TeX rendering engine for imbedding math in html; have a <tex> tag equivalent to $$, but then you would have to support LaTeX too, and who knows what other kinds of TeX would want thier equations to render as well.
Re:BAD xml standards have made the w3 MORE irrelev (Score:2)
I agree to an extent. When you first see XSL and realise that it is a real programming language (unlike CSS), it becomes tempting to see it as a panacea. In reality, it's best for things which are more simple than a traditional program would do.
To do more complicated stuff, where you want reuse and modularity, something like Python+(DOM|Sax) or Perl+XPath is a better "XML-way of doing things".
XPath is actually very powerful when combined with a decent programming language. For example, to pull out all <code>d text below a certain node of a document, into an array of strings, a single perl statement will do:
$codelines = $xp->find('./code/text()', $node);Fairly complicated parsing, which would be pretty fiddly to do by hand, becomes as simple as describing the location of a file in a subdirectory. XML Query Language will take over from XPath for tasks which are even more complicated - things like inner joins in SQL, etc.
Re:The W3C is irrelevant (Score:2)
Just because someone isn't using IE does not make them a poor idiot who can't afford whatever it is you're selling. They could be some high-up CEO guy viewing your page on a Palm. Or maybe a consultant who won't recommend you to others because your page wouldn't let them in.
Keep your eyes on Kafka for KDE2 (Score:2)
Kafka will offer many of the features that Dreamweaver /Frontpage offer but build with it's own unique functionality.
Standards -- why bother? (Score:3)
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.
Re:Amaya... does it really work? (Score:1)
Actually, it would be a an interesting stat that Google might be able to pump out... Run HTML verifying the utility against every page in their cache
Re:unux? (Score:1)
-
Re:FrontPage? (Score:4)
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.
Re:previous Amaya experience (Score:1)
Forms just don't work.
I couldn't post this using Amaya because.
1) I couldn't see what I was typing - if I press return it jumps somewhere and refuses to let me enter the text box again. And if I don't press return the text flows out of the text box and off to the side of the window into oblivion.
2) The submit button took me to preview and after that nothing else worked
3) the passwosrd field didn't work, slashdot thought I was still anonymous coward.
4) It also doesn't support the X clipboard properly - after writing this rant once and it 'losing it', I did it again, but this time I cut a copy in case it did it again, which it did. However, Paste didn't work.
5) GIFs kept causing it to print error messages to t the terminal I launched it from.
As soon as I've sent this I shall pop back to the shell window and type rm -rf...
FP
Re:Wow! -- iCab Error Log for /. (Score:1)
Error (187/4): The character '&' must be written as '&'
which is not exactly /.'s fault. The others, of course, are.
Whoever started the "play games with the parser so that as many HTML errors as possible get interpreted correctly" race ought to be fired. Anybody got a time machine?? Anyway, almost no web pages at all have correct HTML. We should mount a "complain about bad HTML" campaign. I'll start writing a few appropriate letters to google.com. :-/
Re:Three comments. (Score:1)
It is, in the sense that both "http://slashdot.org/story/" and "http://slashdot.org/story" are valid URLs. However, the latter points at a different thing than the former.
Also, URL portions do not necessarily refer to directories and files, that just happens to be how most webservers work. It's quite possible to have a webserver return two different pages for "http://slashdot.org/story/" and "http://slashdot.org/story".
Re:Silly comparison (Score:1)
Well, yes. I wouldn't want to use XML-based tools to handle large volumes of data because all current implementations are very slow in comparison to SQL.
However, XML need not be stored in text files on a hard disk. There is talk of having DBMSs which have an XML front end instead of an SQL front end (but still store data in whatever insanely optimised format internally).
Here, here. I hate it when people try to use the wrong tool for the job, just because it's fashionable.
Re:Three comments. (Score:1)
You actually need to type in http:// in the "Open" field at the top of the screen.
Hey, then check out my website [slashdot.org]! Hmm...
Re:FrontPage? (Score:1)
Re:arachnophilia (Score:1)
I loved arachnophilia! (Before I became a free software zealot.)
One problem with it, though (beside from it being closed source [AFAIK] and for Windows which is evil) is that it does html 3.2 code and no css.
It's so very scriptable though, that that's not a problem. I hacked it slightly to produce html 4.0 code (this was way back, before xhtml) and it's a very nice program.
Re:Wow! (Score:1)
Amaya is surely buggy as hell. It's image rendering seems to cause random lines nearby images, align images slightly wrong and css support is far from correct. For example see w3.org/Style [w3.org] with Amaya and Mozilla or IE5.5 (which renders some of it incorrectly though). I wonder if the page is really supposed to look like it. Also it seems to fail even the first test of CSS Test Suite [w3.org]. Thanks but I think I will continue to check my web pages with validator.w3.org [w3.org], Mozilla [mozilla.org] and IE5.5.
_________________________
unux? (Score:1)
"But Doctor, if they take away my head surely I'll die?"
Re:The W3C is irrelevant (Score:1)
The W3C is corporate driven. You have to pay a hefty membership sum to be able to contribute. This is anathema to the way the Internet grew, where people became net.goods by contributing code.
It also suffers from the standards-body slow-as-molasses syndrome. I have participated in several working groups and they sem to work under a mandate to make as few changes as possible.
An effort such as HTML++ got delayed time and time again.
To reiterate, XML is here only because it originated outside the W3C umbrella.
Re:No Unicode in Amaya (Score:1)
Of course it is. All you have to do is read the specifications. Unicode is the Document Character Set of HTML. It's all there in the HTML specificaton. In XML Unicode is not only the Document Character Set but also the default encoding(s). And it doesn't matter for my point if this is good or bad. The deciscion to base HTML and XML on Unicode was made by W3C, and W3C also made Amaya. So something is not done in the right order here. Get text support right first. Then move on to less important things, like style sheets, MathML etc.
Re:Three comments. (Score:1)
em{TAB}{RET}
turns into
emacs
due to filename completion. A user-interface aid.
"prefix http:// completion" is a perfectly valid user interface aid.
Don't confuse the 2 interfaces.
Adherence (Score:1)
If it is not then who? It is a product from
W3C isn't it?
Yes, I do agree it is a lot less hyped up
but there is a reason for that.
It is not for the regular public.
It is mainly for developers.
:)
Re:previous Amaya experience (Score:1)
That's how you ship shoddy goods, by telling people that they're shoddy in advance. They know what they're getting.
If it was alpha I've have interpreted it as "we know it doesn't work fully, help us fix it by finding and hopefully isolating bugs"
If it was beta I'd have interpreted it as "we think it works, go break it, I dare you".
It was marked as neither alpha nor beta; it truth it appeared to be pre-alpha, which could be why.
It's not "hoarding the code". It's simply not releasing garbage that could well _confuse_ anyone that looks at it. If you can't code it, don't - let someone else who can do it. That's Open Source collaboration.
FP
Re:Three comments. (Score:2)
http://slashdot.org
http://64.28.67.48
http://0x401c4330
http://1075594032
http://0010007041460
I'm sure I could leave off the http:// to, and just jump around to random numbers.
Re:FrontPage? (Score:1)
>the task of having a size-locked table
You shouldn't have to make your layout tables a fixed width. You site should fill the screen of a browser at any resolution, it shouldn't waste 75% of the screen at high resolutions. Why should I have to load two pages to read all your colocation [psychasia] information when it would all easily fit on one screen? Likewise, all the items in your news section would fit on one page. People on slow connections would much rather use a scrollbar occationally than have to load a new page every three paragraphs.
No MacOS support? (Score:5)
Re:FrontPage? (Score:1)
Re:FrontPage? (Score:1)
Yes you did. "Good" HTML isn't supposed to have any formatting at all. Yours is full of it. Yes, I am well aware of CSS' limitations, but you should be aware that any standards organization or accessibility organization would decry this as "good" code. I'll leave the "features vs. accessibility" argument to someone else.
I agree with Wonko; I don't like all these "640x480 in a box" sites, either. I run my screen at 1920x1440, and your site is just ugly. I can barely read the text, and the "box" the site is in is smaller than my GAIM windows.
Finally, validation is important. All my personal HTML validates as XHTML 1.0 Strict, but that's hardly realistic. Rather, getting pages "90%" compliant is usually good enough, and even the Any Browser Campaign [anybrowser.org] admits this.
If you're interested in accessibility, check out the Any Browser Accessible Site Design [anybrowser.org] page. You might be surprised at all the "inaccessible" elements your site uses. I know you said you didn't care about anyone but "average" people, but terming "average" as people using 640x480 and using a modern browser cuts out too many people. I noticed you linked to Bobby. Maybe you should read it sometime.
I have seen many sites that look like this, and I rarely get anything good off of them. Maybe it's the design and maybe it's the content, but when I see a site like this, I generally pull out in 30 seconds. If you want to see real web design, take a look at the big sites who depend on web traffic to make a living, like Yahoo! [yahoo.com], eBay [ebay.com], or even Slashdot [slashdot.org]. You'll notice all of these sites will render cleanly and correctly in about any browser you throw at it. That's because none of those sites is big on specifying formatting.
Performance of the Win32 version (Score:2)
With poor CSS support and poor feedback, this browser is unlikely to succeed, even as an evaluation tool of new technologies.
Re:The W3C is irrelevant (Score:1)
Re:The W3C is irrelevant (Score:2)
Amaya and HTML .. (Score:3)
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?!?!
dies for me (Score:1)
*** Thot: Irrecoverable error ***
seki-strombrg> strace -f
fstat(4, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=67,
old_mmap(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x4001d000
read(4, "$&\'*-./0123456789abcdefghijklmno"..., 4096) = 67
--- SIGSEGV (Segmentation fault) ---
rt_sigaction(SIGBUS, {SIG_DFL}, {0x810847c, [], SA_RESTART|0x4000000}, 8) = 0
rt_sigaction(SIGPIPE, {SIG_IGN}, {SIG_DFL}, 8) = 0
rt_sigaction(SIGSEGV, {SIG_DFL}, {0x810847c, [], SA_RESTART|0x4000000}, 8) = 0
rt_sigaction(SIGABRT, {SIG_DFL}, {0x810847c, [], SA_RESTART|0x4000000}, 8) = 0
write(2, "*** Thot: Irrecoverable error **"..., 33*** Thot: Irrecoverable error ***) = 33
_exit(1) = ?
seki-strombrg> cat
Red Hat Linux release 6.2 (Zoot)
seki-strombrg> uname -m
i686
*I* care. (Score:1)
Market does all sort of bad things today. Why should I?
About ease of use, I don't agree that most developers do care about it. And I don't care about who has the market share, so my products are *NOT* browser specific. For example, my home page is browseable with any web browser, and now I'm starting to do a WAP friendly version of my site (using perl to translate the content, of course)
If you think that W3C is irrelevant, please figure out where we could be if W3C never existed.
--
Luis González
Re:Where is JavaScript? (Score:2)
Re:The W3C is irrelevant (Score:2)
Re:Actually, the new IE with Win2K requires http:/ (Score:1)
Re:Three comments. (Score:1)
Re:Amaya and HTML .. (Score:1)
I agree. Furthermore, Amaya is pretty useful for viewing extremely compliant web pages that use parts of the w3c standard that neither Netscape nor IE support. Try viewing Amaya's default page in Netscape or IE...
Granted, there aren't many pages out there like that, but it's nice to know there's a browser that can save you in those cases.
Re:Three comments. (Score:2)
Respectfully, this is bullshit. I expect end-users to react with some degree of confusion to the distinction between a hostname and a URL. I do not expect it of programmers, and if a programmer can't get over something that most people learn in "HTML for Complete Imbeciles," (s)he should power down and back away from the computer slowly.
Re:No MacOS support? (Score:2)
Re:No Unicode in Amaya (Score:2)
I have read the specifications. Unicode requirement is a "rider", something added to the standard to serve purpose completely unrelated to the standard's purpose. I hope, it will go away just like requirement for ASCII-only text went away when software that implemented RFC-822, SMTP, NNTP and FTP refused to put that restriction into most of implementations after it was found that it causes nothing but harm.
I agree that it's nice to have Unicode supported, but only as one of charsets -- by default everything that can be charset-blind and data-transparent should be done that way, so if implementation of multiple charsets is necessary for user interface or some other purpose, it should be easy to add on top of that. XML, of course, is not designed that way, as it standardizes the use of multiple languages per document but defines only one charset per document -- a feature that, I believe, was added to serve partisan interest of promoting the use of Unicode over all other charsets. In fact, XML can be easily extended to support multiple charsets per document, and implementation of charset attribute would be a no-brainer if not the "political" decision of W3C to support Unicode consortium and not provide a better umbrella for national standards (ISO 2022 is the last, and very poor example of providing an umbrella -- among other problems it's not extensible), and actually XML and HTML are currently the best starting points for thing like that. Too bad, right now there is no alternative to do that but by forking standards, as W3C and IETF, led by "unicoders", are unwilling to do it within their framework.
Re:Amaya... does it really work? NO! (Score:1)
Re:The W3C is irrelevant (Score:1)
Re:Amaya... does it really work? (Score:1)
I would personaly really love a reference implementation - something that could help me ensure standards compliance. This isnt it yet.
Re:No Unicode in Amaya (Score:2)
The cornerstone of text in HTML and XML is Unicode.
It isn't. People who use non-iso8859-1 characters always demanded equality of charsets and usable ways of encapsulation of the charset information (MIME has it in the headers, but no standard for document body was developed, even though it's easy if someone actually tried to establish it as a standard). Unicode is one of "standards" that everyone who is supposed to benefit from, is fighting against, yet committee of "unicoders" don't listen. A lot of Internet standards were infested with "mandatory use of Unicode" only because of the efforts of a single, but extremely persistent and annoying person -- Martin Duerst.
Re:mathML... Why can't it be like TeX? (Score:1)
html to speach browser
and it's brocken
for imbedding math
I usually happily float on by typos (want thier equations) and such but your spelling drove me crazy.
Confucius observed, "If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant; if what is said is not what is meant, then what must be done remains undone; if this remains undone, morals and art will deteriorate; if justice goes astray, the people will stand about in helpless
confusion. hence, there must be no arbitrariness in what is said. This matters above everything."
Re:FrontPage? (Score:2)
All content should fit on one page? All of what? one category? one topic?
Slashdot doesnt, yahoo doesnt, hell, no one I know of does.
It is the design *I* chose. Many others choose different designs. Thats mine.
You are nitpicking about design choices, and REALLY offtopic. The point was that frontpage is a decent editor, that Amaya didnt render correctly formatted pages, and that is all.
I chose to make it that way. It is valid HTML, it lays out information in a logical fashion, and is stylish..
ALL in my opinion.
As to the slow connection, ALL the graphics are already loaded each new page. All they need to get is the new text.
You dont like it, fuck off.
I think he meant (Score:1)
I cannot speak for your graphics-preloading argument because I do not know how well this is supported by browsers, but that notwithstanding, just requesting a new page requires TCP/IP overhead and rerendering. This is certainly an issue with people who have overloaded or "burstable" connections and people still using old Pentiums.
I know this is really off-topic, but I think it needs to be said. You shouldn't be so rude (i.e. "fuck off") to Wonko, especially since you encouraged him to go to your page and point out errors. You should also pay attention to him because he is a user, not a boss. Making flashy websites to impress bosses is one thing, but making successful sites that draw people in is another thing. He gave you some opinionated, though valid, suggestions. If you're truly a good designer, you won't dismiss criticism/suggestions with "fuck off".
Re:I think he meant (Score:2)
I agree that he meant that more content should fit on one screen. But, in response, I go back to it being rather offtopic. It doesnt have ANYTHING to do with Amaya, nor with rendering. The pages layout is a design choice.
I will agree with you that there is a tcp/ip overhead, and that it re-renders. However, in response, I will say that the pages are very tighly designed, and load relatively quickly considering how much graphics are on them.
And of course, I will disagree with your closing statement.
I take great offense at someone going THIS offtopic when he could have simply emailed me, and handled it there. He criticized my design CHOICE. Not the validity, not why it rendered poorly on Amaya (because Amaya SUCKS), but because he had a different opinion.
As to the 'user/boss' thing.. what you fail to grasp is that I run/own/code psychasia.com. It is me. We are one and the same.
So, I make successful sites that bring in users. I know because they buy my suits, and my car radios (aiwa cdc-mp3 ROCKS).
I agree that he is opinonated, and I will even agree that some of what he said had validitiy.
One of the things I didnt like about the site was the lack of text display. However, I prefered a stand out site. It was a conscience choice.
And finally, I am a good designer, I am not afraid to say so, and I make a damn good living at it. My attitude matches my persona, and my style of business. VERY honest, VERY upfront.
What you see is what you get. If you dont like it...
Well, you get the idea.
(On a side note, I was being sarcastic when I did the fuck off, hence the smiley. If I MEANT it, it would have been bold, red, and lots of exclamations after it.. NOT that I react like that to a post on
Three comments. (Score:2)
Some notes after testing on Win98:
Re:Destroying markets ... (Score:1)
Your way of creating standards kills brilliance. There are a few people out there who are really brilliant, but nobody is capable of seeing it, so they're not scratching itches. Then, you've got a few idiots coming along trying to convince everybody that they actually have a good product, and since nobody understands brilliance even when it's before their eyes, well, the result is apparent, two identical sucky browsers.
Re:Performance of the Win32 version (Score:1)
Re:FrontPage? (Score:1)
But, it is also worth noting that Tim Berners-Lee never thought anybody would write code by hand...
Re:The W3C is irrelevant (Score:1)
Re:If you want to get nit-picky (Score:1)
As you get older your eyes get less sensitive ('cos nature is trying it's best to kill you). Which means black text on a grey background becomes harder and harder to read the older you get.
You young pups thing you know it all (nature's way of keeping you alive
You might say that old people don't use the web - but that's simply not true and you'll be old some day and I don't think you'll stop using it.
Walk a mile in other people's shoes sometime.
Re:Actually, the new IE with Win2K requires http:/ (Score:1)
try invalidurl.com and watch the status bar
trying invalidurl.org
trying invalidurl.net
it then does a search
go to the tool menu, internet options, advanced tab, search section
i have search turned off cos it's almost useless
ymmv
editing with Amaya (Score:2)
I've tried writing a page with Amaya, but I don't like it. Especially tables are a nuisance.
The only way of getting any decent work done, was by showing a separate code screen (Reminds me of the old days of WP 5).
For editing HTML, I'll take Emacs with psgml mode over Amaya any day, but then I don't like WYSIAYG (What You See Is ALL you Get) editors anyway.
The other comments here tell me I won't be using it for browsing either. :-)
Roland
Re:FrontPage? (Score:2)
Again, an opinion crouched as fact. In my opinion, it is a good design. There is no proper way (css, etc.) to do a locked table, which is what I wanted, so I did it with html.
>Yes, I am well aware of CSS' limitations, but you should be aware that any standards organization or accessibility organization would decry this as "good" code
I made the site do what I wanted it to do, and did it using html valid code. Period.
>f you're interested in accessibility, check out the Any Browser Accessible Site Design page. You might be surprised at all the "inaccessible" elements your site uses.
If you were blind, you could read my site PERFECTLY. It renders perfectly for sight-disabled people. An easy way to verify that is to load it with lynx. Its clear, clean, and well laid out.
>I noticed you linked to Bobby. Maybe you should read it sometime.
Yes, I have. Try checking my site there. It gets a passing score. There are a few warnings, but as it says (maybe YOU should read it sometime) warnings should be interpreted. I have a blind colleague at work, and she tests my site for me. It works perfectly for her!
>I have seen many sites that look like this, and I rarely get anything good off of them
See, I love people that say this. Here are the facts, not opinions.. The FACTS are:
1. I wanted the design to look like this. I am happy it does. One or two people's opinions on slashdot DEFINITELY wont change that.
2. It is HTML valid code. TOTALLY. By just about anyone's validator, primarily Bobby, and W3C's!
3. It is accessible by almost any browser out there, UNLIKE slashdot, and eBay. Try loading THOSE in amaya. HA!
4. I get PLENTY of customers DUE to this page. You dont see my inbox. I have gotten three multiple-thousand dollar design contracts BECAUSE of that page.
So, I stand behind my page. Yes, I broke the unwritten 'gee, thats bad' rules of using html to do formatting (its *IN* the spec, so I will USE IT until CSS has a way!), of using html to lock the font size, and of locking it to a single resolution.
All of that was done so that no matter WHO looks at it, it looks *THE SAME* and is graphically pleasing. If I chose to open it up to people running at 2million x 1million, it wouldnt be NEARLY as pleasant to 640x480 users.
On another site of mine I monitored browser sizes, and the OVERWHELMING majority was 800x600 (like over 60%), and very few above 1024.
As such, I design for the greatest number of users. I stand behind my decisions, and my customers seem to be quite happy about it.
Re:Three comments. (Score:3)
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.
Re:The W3C is irrelevant (Score:2)
Don't get me wrong. I absolutely LOVE IE5, I have developed a number of client-side-based web applications all leveraging its kick-butt support for XML, XSL, javascript, CSS, DOM and overall DHTML. But I kept in mind that most of IE5's implementations of those standards at the time were indeed mostly specific to Microsoft as most of those standards were still in the process of being clearly defined by the W3C.
But most of those applications were for company-wide Intranet tools or a subset of our "beta" users, in short, a smaller well-defined group of people we KNEW would use IE5. We'd never release a product relying solely on non-standards based technologies to millions of users just because "they should all be using IE5 anyway".
Standards are bound to evolve to more and more reflect all the web-enabled devices that are coming to the market, don't fight them, embrace them. Or watch the world pass you by.
Re:Wow! (Score:3)
Re: XHTML and Netscape 6 (Score:2)
As of Mozilla M18, actually, it didn't support XHTML correctly. My website was done entirely in XHTML and CSS, but really bone-simple things like image and blockquote elements weren't displaying. (Not "weren't displaying correctly," they just disappeared.) It's my understanding that Mozilla/NS6 uses a separate XML parser for XHTML files, and the XML parser isn't quite there yet. I'd like to think that's been fixed for the final Netscape 6, but I'm not optimistic--the bug fixes related to this didn't appear to be marked with a real high priority.
I'm teaching my mother to use it (Score:3)
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? :-)
No Unicode in Amaya (Score:2)
Really?
The most important thing for any web browser is the capability to display text. The cornerstone of text in HTML and XML is Unicode. The main browsers have had Unicode support for years. The upcoming Mozilla has brilliant Unicode support.
So what about Amaya - the browser alternative from W3C, the organization that made Unicode the basis of HTML and XML? No support for Unicode!
Now, when was Unicode invented exactly? --- Oh, was it that many years ago? Oh my....
It's ignored because it's not meant to be used. (Score:3)
(Timothy, what do you know anything about?)
Re:Amaya and HTML .. (Score:5)
Your site uses HTML 4.0 Transitional (<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"...). If you want to use Frames, you should use HTML 4.0 Frameset. Or did you mean frames on other sites?
The "scheme://" part of a URL is compulsory. See RFC 1738 [faqs.org]. Maybe it's good for a normal browser to allow you to omit "http://", but if the W3C's reference browser did this it could lead people to think that "www.w3c.org" is a valid URL.
Amaya is there to educate web designers and web-browser designers, so it has to be picky. That probably means that it's not a good web browser to use for browsing today's largely non-conforming www.
Re:If you want to get nit-picky (Score:2)
Sorry.. its a karma-whorific day today, and I lost track. Thanks for pointing that out to me.
As to my professionalism, I do strive for betterness, but I also have my own preferences as well, as does anyone. I disagree with the opinion that all sites should display as much text as possible on a screen. I would love to see more graphically designed sites out there. But again, thats just me.
And of course, to your advice about fuck, hey, its a personal choice. I am brash, and sometimes, yeah, rude. I dont pretend to be perfect. But I am honest, and I do use whatever words express what I feel best. To me, in that situation, that did. I stand behind my choice.
Although next time I might add a tag, or maybe not.
first impressions (Score:2)
Oh. A word of warning. Trying to get the Windows binary from the HTTP site results in truncating the download to 4.096MB. Use the ftp site. And no, don't blame IE.
Missing the point (Score:5)
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 [webstandards.org].
--
Re:Three comments. (Score:3)
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 [faqs.org].
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.
Re:Amaya and HTML .. (Score:2)
I see your point about the http, but I would think it would be a decent thing to add as an option..
>Amaya is there to educate web designers and web-browser designers, so it has to be picky.
>That probably means that it's not a good web browser to use for browsing today's largely non-conforming www
My whole point was that I *am* a webdesigner, my sites *are* conforming, and it still doesnt work. Thats not a conformance issue, thats buggy.
Re:FrontPage? (Score:2)
Try comparing mouse-over code from the two.
MS = roughly 4-5 lines,
Dreamweaver= *30*!?!?!
All obfuscated too.
Dreamweaver's output isnt cleanly delineated, isnt indented well (try a few embedded tables for comparison)..
Frontpage isnt the end all be all, but it beats DW there.
Now, when I need a good selection of drag and drop javascript, DreamWeaver looks ALOT sexier tho..
:)
Re:FrontPage? (Score:2)
Thats mad advertising, baby.
previous Amaya experience (Score:2)
I installed and ran their previous version of Amaya a few months ago. I had hoped that it would be a cure for what ails netscape, but it wasn't. Several features did not function properly if it all. I tried to cruise around the web and edit some mathematical formulas for a couple of hours, got fed up, and got rid of the sucker.
If somebody has tried out the latest version, please let me know what you thought of it.
Re:The W3C is irrelevant (Score:2)
That's just the attitude that bought about a majority of the incompatabilities on the web in the first place.
IMHO, the W3C standards should _ALWAYS_ be used on a project unless there is a very good reason not to. The fact that the W3C have defined standards saves each project defining their own.
Re:Three comments. (Score:2)
em
emacs starts.
It's a simple matter of working out what is most sensible to do with something that doesn't fit your schema. If you're Amaya you throw it away (hey, it should refuse to display pages with grammatical and spelling errors too, surely). If you're Netscape then you work out what was most probably wanted. It's called usability.
Anyway there is noting in the standards about how a user should input a URL, is there.
you could have radio-buttons for the protocol part, drop-down menus for specifying
Sheesh,
FP
Re:The W3C is irrelevant (Score:2)
Besides, your employer should consider the legal implications of making sites proprietry. In the UK there's the Disability Discrimination Act, the US has something similar. By making sites use proprietry extensions you are limiting access to those who cannot use mainstream browsers for whatever reason. You seem to be forgetting that not everyone can use IE, even if they want to. Some people may wish to have pages read to them, or have them magnified (Opera, for example, can do the latter).
Just because Microsoft have the market share does not mean they own the internet. If you've read the halloween documents you'll know about protocol de-comoditisation -- that would force everyone to use their products. The consumer should have a right to choose.
Re:The W3C is irrelevant - NOT (Score:2)
If W3C was really that in-effective we wouldn't be using them. From talking to friends (at other jobs) we're not the only ones.
--
Re:Amaya... does it really work? (Score:2)
You could try telnetting to port 80 on randomly selected IP addresses, and then validating the page sent as a response (if there is a response, and it's not an error message). That would be enlightening.
Re:FrontPage? (Score:2)
I actually make money doing this, and I dont need to beleive you. I KNOW. I do it every week. People want results, and style. Whether it renders on lynx, or has alt tags, or is html compliant doesnt matter much to the average person.
BUT, -- BUT -- , I dont write crap code. Check out psychasia.com. Its tight. Its sexy. It looks good in lynx. It has alt tags, it has hidden comments. It renders properly in NS, IE, And even decently on that bastard WebTV. It has the pixel size locked so it looks the same on mac as it does on windows..
It has preloading, mouseovers, AND it is html compliant.
I dont do crap code. And I do it IN frontpage.
If I did it all by hand, I would be billing EASILY for three times as much. Thats nuts.
Plus, I wouldnt have clients swearing by me that say "He did my whole site in one hour ON A SUNDAY NIGHT!".
Thats how I got the job I am in, because a client I did work for saw an opening for a webdesigner at work, and when suggesting me said "This guy is fast AND good."
And I dont spend alot of time fixing crappy code. Far from it. I know what crap FP adds, and I know what to rip out, quickly. It takes less time to fix the code after the page is done than it does to make the page! Both of which are MUCH less time than it would take to manually edit them.
MY big thing now is that I am moving to a MS free desktop, and would LOVE a wysiwyg editor for linux.. But I havent seen any really nice ones that arent commercial..
Maybe mozilla's will be EVENTUALLY.
Re:"The W3C is irrelevant" - untrue (Score:2)
Netscape [mozilla.org] 6 [mozilla.org]and [mozilla.org] XHTML? [mozilla.org] I [mozilla.org] think [mozilla.org]. not [mozilla.org].
This really pisses me off... XHTML is a new standard, and Mozilla could start it off on the right foot perfectly. But they're fucking it up more than Netscape 1.0 did to HTML.
At least it helps make sure that the HTML is clean (Score:3)
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.
Re:"The W3C is irrelevant" - untrue (Score:5)
That is untrue because everyone wants to get onto the XML bandwagon. XML, and all the accompanying technologies (such as XML Schema [w3.org] and XML Linking [w3.org]) 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 [w3.org]-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 :-)
Re:"The W3C is irrelevant" - untrue (Score:2)
A little Hypocritical, don't you think (Score:3)
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?
Re:Amaya and HTML .. (Score:2)
Fix, recheck, and if still broken I hereby grant you the right to bitch.
--Earl
BAD xml standards have made the w3 MORE irrelevant (Score:2)
After DSSSL was shite upon the SGML world, you'd think standards bodies would take a long hard look at what people wanted and were actually using before even thinking of developing another convoluted styles standard. This is pure "design by committee", repleat with all the fractured useless designs you'd expect from such an effort.
And before anyone out there thinks of offering a rebuttal in support for XSL, programming in XML is a silly idea, particularly when the schema used to express programming constructs fails to include even rudimentary reuse and modularity features found in real programming languages thirty years ago.
Re:FrontPage? (Score:2)
You have clearly missed the point of html. html is _not_ a formatting language, it is a markup language. A properly written html document should not be the same pixel width and height on every user agent. It should be written so as to display correctly for any size screen. As far as looking "tight" and "sexy", it looks like all every other all-graphics, designed for 640x480 webpages I have ever seen. Try looking at that page on a 1600x1200 screen and see how "sexy" you think it looks.
>AND it is html compliant.
Yea, about that...
Below are the results of attempting to parse this document with an SGML parser.
Line 4, column 29:
<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript">
^
Error: required attribute "TYPE" not specified
Line 20, column 5:
<html>
^
Error: document type does not allow element "HTML" here
Line 89, column 8:
</html>
^
Error: "HEAD" not finished but document ended
Line 89, column 8:
</html>
^
Error: "HTML" not finished but document ended
Sorry, this document does not validate as HTML 4.0 Transitional.
Wow! (Score:3)