Re: Mailing List Archives improvements: big progresses!

One more suggestion.  (I think someone else may have mentioned this problem 
also, but I'm not sure.)

Some messages show up in the archives with very long lines, which are hard 
to read.  Example: 
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-ws-arch/2003May/0215.html
For message display, it would be helpful to have an easy way to display the 
message with long lines wrapped.  This can be done crudely with 
http://cgi.w3.org/cgi-bin/html2txt .  For example, if the previous URL is 
fed into html2txt, it produces: 
http://cgi.w3.org/cgi-bin/html2txt?url=http%3A%2F%2Flists.w3.org%2FArchives%2FPublic%2Fwww-ws-arch%2F2003May%2F0215.html

I would suggest an option, perhaps in the upper right of the message page:

         Long lines: [ Wrap ] [ Don't wrap ]

Furthermore, it would be easiest if "Wrap" were the default, since that is 
probably the more common need.

However, if you don't want to wrap by default, then it would be nice to at 
least provide a "Wrap long lines" link on the message page to easily 
display a wrapped version.

Thanks!

At 02:23 PM 5/13/2003 +0200, Dominique Hazaël-Massieux wrote:
>Hi all,
>
>Last year (between March and June), we discussed how the W3C Mailing
>List archives could be improved, both in terms of accessibility and
>usability. We came up with a proposal described and defined at:
>http://www.w3.org/2002/03/archives-improvements/
>
>Thanks to the great work done by Jose Kahan, the proposed changes have
>been implemented in Hypermail, the program that formats the email in
>HTML and have been proposed for integration in the next releases of this
>program (meaning that the progresses made for us will also be available
>to a broader users base).
>
>As promised, we have now a short time frame to make real user testing
>with the output produced by the new code:
>http://www.w3.org/2002/03/archives-improvements/implentation-test/ shows
>what the new hypermail produces, with most of the links working as they
>would in a production environment (the test was produced on the mails
>received in January on www-tag).
>Al, Wendy, would it be possible for you to ask people with specific
>handicaps/navigation requirements to look at these proposals and see how
>well they work for them?
>
>Some small (temporary) issues:
>- the index page has not been generated for this example - the program
>that produces them is not hypermail, and also can be tweaked much more
>easily than hypermail, so this might wait for another round
>- there are some inconsistencies in the navigation bar (ml name, broken
>links) that would not appear in a real case
>- the "N.B." note would not appear in a real case either
>
>Note that in any case, and since we have had much time and many
>occasions to discuss the proposals, the corrections that could be
>brought to the current output cannot be very large, so we should only
>try to spot out the main remaining issues.
>
>The comments period is open until June 6 a priori, but let me know if
>this is too short for you to give your feedback on this.
>[FWIW, I intend to open this review slot to the chairs and the team
>members after the AC Meeting]
>
>Thanks,
>
>Dom
>--
>Dominique Hazaël-Massieux - http://www.w3.org/People/Dom/
>W3C/ERCIM
>mailto:dom@w3.org

-- 
David Booth
W3C Fellow / Hewlett-Packard
Telephone: +1.617.253.1273

Received on Thursday, 15 May 2003 18:37:41 UTC