Ian's first archive proposal

Hi Al,

On Fri, Aug 24, 2001 at 11:01:18AM -0400, Al Gilman wrote:
>
> I don't believe I ever got "Ian's old proposal."  Can it be mailed to
> wai-xtech
> as a reply to the thread I started {or just with "archive:" as prefix on the
> subject) for the record as soon as possible?  Or show us where it is in the
> files?

I found the message. It dates from January 2000. I am quoting it here
below (I hope Ian doesn't mind). It was sent to an internal staff list.
Ian's WAI philosophy may have matured more since he sent this (i.e., he
may have another idea for the archives).

On Fri, Aug 24, 2001 at 11:01:18AM -0400, Al Gilman wrote:
> 
> I don't believe I ever got "Ian's old proposal."  Can it be mailed to
> wai-xtech
> as a reply to the thread I started {or just with "archive:" as prefix on the
> subject) for the record as soon as possible?  Or show us where it is in the
> files?

------------------

Message-ID: <3870E117.E39A323B@w3.org>
Date: Mon, 03 Jan 2000 12:49:11 -0500
From: Ian Jacobs <ij@w3.org>
To: sysreq@w3.org
CC: ij@w3.org, dd@w3.org, w3t-wai@w3.org
Subject: [Fwd: HTML Markup problems with new W3C e-mail list archives page for   working groups]


Hi Jose,

In addition to Daniel's comment below, please consider the following
proposals:

1) On a toplevel page such as [1], what is this markup for:

       <colgroup span="6"></colgroup>

   It's not being used to specify any widths for the columns, so I don't
   think it provides that much more information than what the browser can
   deduce from the TRs and TDs.

2) On a list page such as [2]:

   a) Can you use style sheets instead of CENTER, STRONG, NOSHADE, etc.?
      For all pages, I'd recommend using the strict DTD. Also, by generating
      end tags, etc., we can move to xhtml more easily. We can discuss the
      use of style sheets if you'd like.

   b) What's the difference between "Ending: <date>" and
      "Last message date: <date>" and "Archived on: <date>"? None of them (that
      I saw) uses the time in addition to the date, so having "EST" may not
      be useful (or would be more useful if there were full date information
      available).

   c) I recommend a date format that is either "Weekday, DD MMM YYYY" rather
      than "Weekday, MMM DD YYYY".

   d) I'd love to reduce the number of BR elements, but I'm not sure how and 
      I'm not sure it's vital. 

   e) You can make the header and footer link groups (messages sorted by/
      other mail archives/mail actions) more explicitly blocks of links by
      putting them inside a MAP element. Some users may want to skip over
      these navigation blocks, so you would be kind to put a link to the first
      message in the list from the top of the page. For example, where I read
      "4 messages sorted by:", you might make "4 messages" (or "N messages") a
      link to the first message in the list. That way people can jump right 
      to it (from either the top or the bottom of the page).


Thank you,

 - Ian

Received on Tuesday, 28 August 2001 10:11:59 UTC