Section: Software

Amaya

Participant : Vincent Quint.

Amaya is an open source web editor, i.e. a tool for creating and updating 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 as a joint effort with W3C 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 now implements a number of web technologies, 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 content through a formatted representation of documents, while closely following standard formats. Developed jointly with W3C, the software is distributed world wide through the W3C servers and 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. It also helps users to create their own document types defined as XTiger templates.