Amaya | Hacker News Reader

Amaya

w3.org

56 pointsTomte19 comments

I vaguely remember trying this out, back in the days of Frontpage and dialup, before I settled on Notepad for editing HTML. I'm a little surprised that it was a going concern all the way up to 2012, and a little disappointed that it didn't keep going. Is anyone still working on WYSIWYG HTML editors, or is the segment completely dead?

> Is anyone still working on WYSIWYG HTML editors?

Yep, I do time to time: https://html-notepad.com/ ( based on my Sciter Engine https://sciter.com )

It is almost impossible (mathematically speaking) to create reasonable WYSIWYG HTML and CSS editor.

So bad news for anyone looking for WYSIWYG editor to create meaningful web site from scratch using solely WYSIWYG.

For web site creation the only reasonable option is wizard approach - assembling site from predefined and prestyled blocks.

But, it is perfectly possible to create WYSIWYG HTML editor - editor that helps us to create and edit structured text - content portions of sites. That deals with pure HTML, styling is applied to that HTML at the point of content insertion.

The point of Amaya to me wasn't so much WYSIWYG HTML -- where "HTML" should probably be in scare quotes in most instances of such things. It was an actual SGML editor, respecting the DTD (like Emacs PSGML in that regard). I don't remember to what extent it was -- or could have been -- a general SGML editor with arbitrary DTDs. I also used it as a browser at one stage, but it was rather unstable then.

I remember that there was a general SGML editor called Thot (from INRIA) that it was built on. I was interested in generic SGML/XML editors at the time.

Aside from that, I think that Amaya was also used to provide a sample implementation of new/proposed web technologies. It's been a long time though and my memory is fuzzy.

Ah, yes; it was a long time ago -- and a somewhat simpler time. Plenty of good stuff comes from INRIA.

There are some tools but most of them tend to be of the "edit visually, export to HTML" variety which, TBH, makes a bit more sense since pure HTML doesn't have enough information for keeping track of repeated elements and the structure of an entire site. Even tools back in the day when WYSIWYG was way more popular that worked with HTML directly tended to use custom tags and attributes for additional metadata.

There are many products in the WYSIWYG HTML editing space. Webflow is valued at $2B and started out as a Show HN post around 2013, IIRC.

The biggest surprise to me is that Dreamweaver is still alive and kicking.

To be honest, they should call it Nightmarecleaver.

I've never used a better tool for imagemaps but then again that's the only one I've ever used.

Lots of visual editors on websites (e.g. wikipedia's editor) are really wysiwyg html editors for some specific subset of html (often using the browsers built in content-editable feature)

Mac's iWeb was one of the best. It created slow but beautiful website's using SVG objects. Apple killed iWeb in 2011.

Did this ever have any kind of traction? I remember screwing with it as a kid but it always seemed limited and no one ever really talked about working with it.

I remember downloading it at my first job back in 2000 or 2001 but I didn't make much use of it. Even back then there were plenty of alternatives available. I seem to remember that I made quite heavy use of XEmacs for editing HTML and XML files back then, as well as Netscape Composer and Cooktop XML.

This one is abandoned but Mozilla composer still lives on.

Does it? AFAIK it is only Seamonkey Composer that still is under a mostly actively developed project but even that is maintained mainly because of its shared code with the HTML editing component for the email client.

(there is also the equivalent component of Thunderbird but AFAIK that isn't available in any HTML editor)

Wow, how fast does this site load!

Image is less than 50k and the content including style sheet is 10k. No js, no frameworks, no CDN callouts.

The first web page which opens instantly on my phone. So the modern web is fubar.

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