The Amaya project started in 1996. It was carried out and financed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and organization whose primary goal is maintaining and developing international web standards. W3C wanted to present the true potential of the Web as well as to show the modern web technologies all put in a single well-equipped web client. From this investment of money, time and effort the Amaya browser was born, an application not only unique at the time it was created, but also constantly enhanced and developed today.
At first Amaya was simply a HTML + CSS editor, that you could easily use to create a website of your own, no matter if it was just a single page advertising your real estate business or a more complex financial site. As the development of Amaya progressed support for XML and numerous XML applications (for example those from groups XHTML, MathML and SVG) were added.
The current version of Amaya is much more than just a web browser. It’s a powerful tool with versatile and universal editing features available. It is possible to edit all kinds of HTML document as well as style sheets and XML files. Due to their growing popularity SVG images are also supported.
The application features a comprehensible WYSIWYG interface that enables users to smoothly create web pages that are standards compliant and visually attractive. One thing that is worth mentioning is a “structure view” feature that allows to display the object hierarchy in an edited document. By means of the CSS tool it is possible to properly format a document and there is no need to have a stylesheet reference book open on your desktop. Another interesting feature is a tool that makes annotations and comments to your text. That is not all, as Amaya provides a vast range of different features such as Integrated Development Environment (IDE) used by web developers to write code in XHTML, XML, and CSS and validate code on the fly.
Many people engaged in web design activities will also be happy to find out that Amaya offers a tool that informs the user of code sections that contain errors that will make validation impossible.
After you have finished working on your website you can upload it to an FTP in the same application an there is no need to resort to other piece of software that would check if your page has been inserted properly.
In concord with the latest web trends and in compliance with the W3C policy Amaya is available for free and is and open source application. You can easily download it for all popular platforms such as Windows (NT and later), OS X (Intel and PPC), and many distributions of Linux system. It supports the folloving HTML versions: HTML 4.01, XMHTL 1.0, XHTML Basic, XHTML 1.1, as well as HTTP 1.1, MathML 2.0 and other formats.