Re: Proposed improvements to the mailing lists archives

le jeu 28-03-2002 à 04:18, Al Gilman a écrit :
> AG:: I concur (strongly) with David on this one.
> 
> If we are going to have links to these places, and we construct the URLs in the similacrum of a hierarchical container structure, then by all means use the mnemonic value of this tree topology.
> 
> There is no other choice.  URLs are user-visible strings.

Well, if you think we are too mathematical when we are expecting users
to understand our graph model, I think you overestimate the number of
people using the URLs as mnemonic ways to navigate in a web site. I
don't see any special value in reproducing the URL hierarchy in our site
navigation.

Besides, when I say this is a graph, I'm not trying to be mathematical:
- a message page doesn't have one parent, but 4 of them: how do you know
if the user has come to this message through the dated list, thread
list, subject list or author list? I think trying to stick to one of
them would be very confusing for the user.
- I still believe that http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public is the worse
parent you could give to our mailing index pages: this just a list of
mailing list names, without any context. http://www.w3.org/Mail/Lists
might be more appropriate and I really think that if you want a tree
structure, the homepage of the group owning the mailing list would be
the best parent for it. But since this information is not on our system
for now, that won't be easy either.

One thing we could do would be to add a link on "wai-xtech" (in
wai-xtech@w3.org) at the top of the period page to link to the index
page for wai-xtech. This doesn't work in the message page as is, but we
could add the name of the mailing list in the title of the page with the
appropriate link.

David, Al, what do you think?

> The labels using the word 'other' that we have been using for these links are wrong, give false information, to begin with.  Where those lists take you are to listings of super-containers which _include_ the current context that you are moving up from which 'other lists' _does not_.  The notion of Up, Up, Up, as where you are going for ever-widening circles of inclusion is a very good fit, here.

Where do you see that we are using the word "other"... I've not seen it
anywhere?

Regards,

Dom
-- 
Dominique Hazaël-Massieux - http://www.w3.org/People/Dom/
W3C's Webmaster
mailto:dom@w3.org

Received on Thursday, 28 March 2002 05:16:56 UTC