Amaya Overview
Amaya is a complete web browsing and authoring environment.
- Amaya lets users both browse and author Web pages
Using Amaya you can create Web pages and upload them onto a server.
Authors can create a document from scratch, they can browse the web and
find the information they need, copy and paste it to their pages, and
create links to other Web sites. All this is done in a straightforward
and simple manner, and actions are performed in a single consistent
environment. Editing and browsing functions are integrated seamlessly in
a single tool.
- Amaya maintains a consistent internal document model adhering to the
DTD
Amaya always represents the document internally in a structured way
consistent with the Document Type Definition (DTD). A properly structured
document enables other tools to further process the data safely.
Amaya allows you to display the document structure at the same time as
the formatted view, which is portrayed diagrammatically on the screen.
- Amaya is able to work on several documents at a time
Several (X)HTML, native MathML (.mml) and SVG (.svg) documents can be
displayed and edited at a time.
- Amaya helps authors create hypertext links
The editor helps you create and text out links to other documents on
the Web from the document you currently are working on. You can view the
links and get a feel for how the information is interconnected. This
feature is not limited to HTML anchors. With XLink, any MathML and SVG
element can be a link too.
- Amaya includes a collaborative annotation application
Annotations are external comments, notes, remarks that can be attached
to any Web document or a selected part of the document.
You can find a more detailed description of Amaya and of its features in
the W3C Note "An Introduction to
Amaya."
The image shows the Amaya main view. Along the top are a number of buttons
associated with browsing. The panel at the left proposes a set of editing
tools. At any time, the user can select any part of a document and assign to
it an HTML type (H1, LI, EM, etc.), by means of the XHTML palette, or of the
shortcut buttons. Such a command transforms the selected part into an element
of the chosen type.
Transport protocols
Amaya accesses remote sites by means of HTTP/1.1. Implementation of this
protocol is provided by the W3C libwww. Amaya takes advantage of the
most advanced features of HTTP, such as content negotiation to retrieve the
most appropriate picture format, keep alive connections to save bandwidth and
authentication to allow secure remote publishing.
Support for CSS
Amaya has support for the W3C style sheet language CSS although this is not yet complete. For a large set of
properties like foreground color, background color, background image,
alignment, etc. the user can interact on the formatted document by using
style specific tools. In this case it's not necessary to well know about the
CSS syntax. At the same time Amaya provides an efficient mechanism to test
and associate external style sheets with HTML documents. Users can also use
Amaya to download, edit and publish CSS style sheets as well as HTML
pages.
Amaya provides a support for MathML
presentation markup which allows users to browse and edit Web pages
containing mathematical expressions (see some
examples). Like the rest of the document, these expressions are
manipulated through specific editing tools proposed in the Amaya panel
(palettes of constructors and special characters).
When a character string is typed in a MathML element, Amaya parses the
string and automatically generates the elements mo (operator), mn (number),
and mi (identifier).
Amaya uses namespaces to integrate MathML expressions within XHTML
documents, i.e. HTML documents written in XML syntax. This mechanism is also
used to mix graphics in SVG and mathematics in MathML within XHTML documents
(see an example).
Support for SVG
Amaya supports a subset of the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format, namely basic shapes,
text, images, and foreignObject (the latter is useful to include HTML
fragments or MathML expressions in drawings).
Alpha transparency, transformations, and animations are supported and the
SVG source can be inspected and manipulated at any time.
The graphics are written in XML and may be mixed freely with HTML and
MathML. It also has annotation capabilities.
Support for RDF and XPointer
Amaya includes a collaborative annotation application based on Resource
Description Framework (RDF), XLink, and XPointer. From the technical point of
view, annotations are usually seen as metadata, as they give
additional information about an existing piece of data. In this project, we
use a special RDF annotation schema for describing
annotations.
Annotations can be stored locally or in one or more annotation
servers. When a document is browsed, Amaya queries each of these
servers, requesting the annotations related to that document.. Amaya uses
XPointer to describe where an
annotation should be attached to a document. With this technique, it is
possible to annotate any Web document independently, without needing to edit
that document. Finally Amaya presents annotations with pencil annotation
icons 
. and attaches
XLink attributes to these icons. If the user single-clicks on an annotation
icon, the text that was annotated is highlighted. If the user double-clicks
on this icon, the annotation text and other metadata are presented in a
separate window.
About Amaya
Documentation
