The W3C web editor and browser first released in 1996 was Amaya.
Amaya was developed by INRIA and later adopted by the World Wide Web Consortium as a testbed for emerging web standards. It combined WYSIWYG web authoring with browsing, allowing users to create and inspect documents while experimenting with technologies such as HTML, CSS, MathML, SVG, RDF, and XPointer.
The project grew from earlier French editing software: Amaya descended from the Grif structured SGML editor and the Symposia HTML editor. Its role was unusual because it was not merely a commercial page designer or a mainstream consumer browser. The W3C used it to explore features that larger browsers did not yet support, making it valuable as a standards-development tool.
Amaya is sometimes confused with later editors such as Nvu, KompoZer, or BlueGriffon, but those were separate projects. Amaya remained lightweight and ran on several platforms, including Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. Development eventually ceased; the last release was in January 2012, and W3C and INRIA stopped supporting the project.