Saving and Publishing Amaya

Amaya enables you to save (X)HTML documents either in (X)HTML or text format. Other documents (SVG, MathML or CSS) are saved according to their original format. You can save both remote and local documents in two ways, using the Save and Save As commands.

In addition, you can change a number of Amaya publishing options using the Publishing Preferences dialog. You open this dialog by choosing Preferences > Publishing from the Edit menu.

Amaya does not provide any global view of a set of pages installed on a server. However, you can save files to a remote server in the same way you save local files, using the Save and Save As commands. During these operations, Amaya also saves any newly added images.

The Save Command

The Save command saves the current document to the original location. You can access the Save command by choosing Save from the File menu, clicking the Save button on the button bar, or by using keyboard shortcuts Ctrl s. Newly added images are saved in the same directory automatically; confirmation is only requested when the document name is unknown.

You can also fetch a document from servers by specifying the server directory name. This is very useful when browsing, but is not supported by the put method. In this case, Amaya detects that the document name is missing and asks you either to use a default name or to complete the request.

Note:    Use the Save As command to save your document to a different location.

The Save As Command

Choosing Save As from the File menu opens the Save As dialog, which allows you to save the current document with a different format and to a different location.

You can:

• save the document only or with its resources (images, objects, style, scripts) to a local disk or to a remote server;
• embedded images and objects can be saved into the same document directory or a different location;
• embedded style (including imported style sheets and images) and scripts can be saved into the same document directory or a different location;
• all included URIs can be updated.

The items in the dialog box are used as follows:

• The Where to save field indicates where the file has to be written. This can be a file in the local file system (for example, /pub/html/welcome.html) or the name of a remote URI (for example, http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/Welcome.html).

  Note:   Usea complete path for the URL. You should also make sure that you have the rights to do a PUTmethod if it is a remote location. Refer to the page on configuring your server to accept the PUT method or ask your Web administrator.

• Copy Images, Copy resources (styles and scripts), and Transform URLs toggles
  • The Transform URLs toggle transforms all current URIs into relative URIs when possible. Of course, if the document is saved in a local file and URIs point to remote files, URIs will be absolute. This ensures that all the links in the document remain correct after the copy.

    If you save the document locally to publish it by ftp just because your provider or your Webmaster doesn't allow you to use the PUT method, you must disable this option to not alterate links computed when the document was on the http server.

  • The Copy Images toggle indicates whether the images and objects embedded in the current document must be copied along with the document to a new location. You have to keep this switch on when you want to generate a complete copy of the document.

    When images and objects are copied, Amaya updates automatically all src and data attributes to point new locations. New locations will be relative URIs.

  • The Copy resources (styles and scripts) toggle indicates whether styles (including imported style sheets and images) and scripts embedded in the current document must be copied along with the document to a new location. You have to keep this switch on when you want to generate a complete copy of the document.

    When these resources are copied, Amaya updates automatically all links and processing instructions to point to these new resource locations. New locations will be relative URIs.
    

• The Document format offers a choice between HTML, XML (XHTML) and Text for HTML documents. This submenu is not shown when saving a SVG, a MathML, a CSS, or any other document type. By default, Amaya keeps the current document format.

  The entry Text removes the HTML mark-up and replaces it by spaces, newlines, and so on.

• The Charset field allows one to choose the charset of the document between a proposed list. This option only works with documents that support the notion of charset, such as HTML and XML ones, but it's not proposed when saving from the source view. This option is available when saving both remote and local documents.

  Very often the charset of Web documents is controlled by the server. It depends either on the document suffix (html, xml, xhtml, svg, mml), or on instructions given in the .htaccess file.

• The Mime Type field allows one to select the MIME type of the document. If the MIME type you're looking for is not listed, you can type it in yourself. This button is only active when saving a document to a server (local file systems don't store the MIME metadata information.).

• The Where to save images field allows you to give the directory where images and objects have to be saved. When the Copy Images button is selected, this field is initialized with the name of the saved document directory.
• The Where to save resources field allows you to give the directory where style sheets and scripts have to be saved. When the Copy resources (styles and scripts) button is selected, this field is initialized with the name of the saved document directory.

Three buttons complete this dialog:

• The Save button starts the process of transforming the document.

  When saving to a remote location, check that the http_proxy is not set, or that the proxy server and the target server are configured to work with the PUT method.

• The Clear button removes the current contents of "Where to save ..." fields.
  
• The Cancel button terminates the command.

Saving and characters encoding (charset)

Three standard encodings are considered:

• us-ascii is a 7-bit code that represents 96 printable characters (positions 32 through 127 decimal).
• iso-8859-1 is a 8-bit code that represents the same characters as us-ascii, at the same positions, plus 95 additional printable characters.
• utf-8 is a variable length encoding scheme for the Universal Character Set - UCS (ISO10646 aka Unicode). UCS represents thousands of characters. Note that the 96 first characters have the same positions in UCS as in us-ascii (and then as in iso-8859-1).

If an XML or HTML document contains a character that is not available in the character set (charset) available with the encoding, a special representation is required. XML offers two such representations of characters:

1. Character references represent the position (in decimal or hexadecimal) of the character in the UCS. For example, the greek letter alpha is represented as α (hexadecimal) or α (decimal)
2. Entity references use a name to represent a content (in that case a character). For example the greek letter alpha may be represented as α

Character references may be used in any XML or HTML document, but entity references are allowed only if the document itself contains a means to resolve the name.

Entity name resolution is provided by the Document type definition which refers to the DTD where names and their associated contents are defined. Practically, this means that you can use entity references only if the <!DOCTYPE ...> is present and refers to a DTD that defines the names you use.

With that in mind, it is easier to understand how Amaya works. By default, Amaya preserves the initial encoding of the document, that is the encoding that was associated with the document at loading time. You can check this encoding with command File/Document Information (Charset field). The Save command saves the document with that encoding, while the Save As command allows you to choose another encoding (Charset field).

When saving a document (Save or Save As commands), all characters that are available in the charset of the encoding are just written using the encoding. Only the other characters are written using character or entity references. The choice between these two options is made according to the doctype. If there is a doctype that refers to a DTD that defines a name for the character, an entity reference is used (i.e. a name), otherwise Amaya generates a character reference in hexadecimal.

Note: the File/Change The Document Type command allows you to associate, to change or to remove the doctype of a document at any time. This allows you to generate either character references or entity references.

Saving Documents as Text

You san save your document as text using the Save As command from the File menu. HTML mark-up is replaced by spaces, new lines, and so on. A list of all URIs used in the document is appended to the file.

To save your document as text:

1. Choose Save As from the File menu to open the Save As dialog.

2. Click the Text button in the Document format section to save the document in text format to a local file.