Producing HTML pages in the early days of the Web was easy. A simple text editor was enough to do the job, provided the author knew a few tags. That is no longer the case, especially for taking advantage of the most exciting new Web technologies. Dedicated tools are needed, that know about the new languages to really help Web authors. Amaya is such a tool. By integrating seamlessly browsing and editing features, it allows users to literally edit the Web. It provides support for XML, XHTML, MathML, SVG, XLink, and CSS in such a way that authors may create, edit and publish multi-XML-namespaced documents that mix text, tables, mathematical equations, graphics, hyperlinks and style. To make manipulation of such compound documents easier, a WYSIWYG interface is provided.

All technologies supported by Amaya allow for representation of text, or at least characters and symbols, like in mathematics. By using an uniform representation of text and structure for all XML-based languages, a better data integration is achieved and a more consistent user interface is provided. This uniform representation is based on Unicode, which allows the whole environment to be internationalized.

The talk gives a quick overview of Amaya's architecture and then focuses on the use of Unicode, the problems it poses and the advantages it provides in such an environment.