Section: Software

Amaya

Participants : Vincent Quint, Irène Vatton.

Amaya is an open source web editor, i.e. a tool used to create and update documents directly on the web. Browsing features are seamlessly integrated with editing features in a uniform environment that allows users to save files locally and on remote servers as well. This follows the original vision of the web as a space for collaboration and not just a one-way publishing medium.

Amaya started to showcase web technologies in a fully-featured web client. The main motivation for developing Amaya was originally to provide a framework that can integrate many web technologies during their development, with the goal of demonstrating these technologies in action while taking advantage of their combination in a single, consistent environment.

Amaya implements a number of recent web technologies developed by W3C, such as HTML and the XHTML family, CSS style sheets, generic XML , MathML (for mathematical expressions), and SVG (for vector graphics). It allows all those document formats to be edited simultaneously in compound documents. It also includes a collaborative annotation application based on RDF , XLink , and XPointer .

It is a unique tool for manipulating simultaneously different kinds of contents through a formatted representation of documents, while closely following standard formats. Supporting several languages from the XML family allows Amaya to integrate seamlessly such complementary functionalities as browsing, editing, publishing, and annotating. This enables a more creative type of work on the web, allowing users not only to consume existing information but also to produce new information and to interact with other users. Developed jointly with W3C , the software is distributed world-wide through the W3C servers and their many mirrors. It is also part of several Linux distributions.

Amaya is also used as a platform for experimenting and distributing new editing techniques and document formats developed in WAM. It provides a full implementation of the XTiger language and its constraint-driven editing feature (see section 6.4.1 ). It also helps users to create their own document types defined as XTiger templates.

Now that a number of document languages are implemented in the editor, developments focus on usability. The latest extensions are oriented towards robustness, completeness and ease of use. Many contributions are received from external developers and have to be coordinated with the project-team. They concern localization in various languages, including eastern languages, tests and adaptations to various platforms. Other contributions provide improvements and new features.

Three public releases were made in 2009, in January, July, and December.