# Working with the Amaya Browser and Editor

You can use Amaya to open and browse local and remote Web documents. You can also use it to create and modify Web pages.

## Browsing versus editing

Browsing with Amaya is similar to browsing with other Web browsers. For example, the Amaya button bar includes stop, back, next, refresh, home, save, and print buttons. There is one important difference: you double-click a link to activate it. See Activating a Link for more information.

Unlike other browsers, Amaya also provides tools for editing web pages. See these topics for more information on editing:

- Editing Documents
- Editing Tables
- Editing Mathematics

## Editor mode and browser mode

By default, Amaya begins in editor mode. In this mode, you can edit the current document as well as browse in the window.

The button bar displays the button when the window is in editor mode, and the button when the window is in browser mode. In browse mode, you can only browse and fill in forms.

To toggle the window from editor mode to browser mode, click the button. Click the button to return to editor mode. You can also select this mode by choosing Editor Mode from the Edit menu, or by using a keyboard shortcut (the default is `Shift-Control-*`).

Note:
You can set the mode independently for each document window.

## Character Sets

Amaya reads HTML and XHTML documents differently:

- Amaya reads HTML documents by default as ISO-Latin-1 files. If an author does not provide information about the character set (charset) in the HTTP header or in a META element, Amaya considers an HTML document to be encoded in ISO-Latin-1.

- Amaya reads XHTML documents by default as UTF-8 files. If an author does not provide information about the charset in the HTTP header, in the XML declaration, or in a META element, Amaya considers an XHTML document to be encoded in UTF-8.

Because the default charset is different for HTML and XHTML documents, authors often create documents using the incorrect charset. For example, consider an XHTML document that uses ISO-Latin-1 but does not provide information about the charset. When the XML parser analyzing the document encounters a character that does not match a valid UTF-8 character, the document is considered to be not well formed. Parsing stops and Amaya displays an error message that proposes either to reload the document as an HTML document or to show parsing errors. If show parsing errors is selected, Amaya activates the Reparse in HTML option on the File menu. Choose this option to set the document's charset to ISO-Latin-1 and re-open the document so it can be properly parsed. Amaya considers the reopened document to be modified (because a charset was added), and you can save it.