An interesting, but Flawed app

I downloaded and test-drove the (barely) OS X version Amaya, the W3C’s browser/editor. It has some very interesting features, but lacks some serious things in the way of interface design and overall feature completion. It does not come remotely close to rendering CSS2. It does, however, handle PNG graphics well. But overall, it is sluggish and incomplete. I am utterly amazed this is a version 9.x application. How that ever happened is beyond me. The use of some interface widget library to make it cross-platform without effort shows in bad ways.

In the end however, other browser developers would do well to check out Amaya and borrow ideas from it. There are indeed some cool ideas there, but the execution of them leaves much to be desired, or developed. In particular, WebKit developers like the Safari team and the Shiira project should borrow some ideas here.

Nothing could be finer than WebKit-based browsers also having editing features. It should go without saying that a web (html/xhtml/xml) browser should also be a capable platform for development. Internally such applications already know a lot about these types of documents and know how to render them! It only stands to reason that such applications should be able to create respective documents and navigate those documents’ structures. Firefox 2 is already doing some of this.

If we are ever going to make a transition to XHTML 2 and CSS 3, we need browsers that can already understand these things and help us author them!