archives: 2 top level reformats

aloha!

attached are 2 versions of a preliminary mock-up of the top level interface,
containing the following features:

1. added a navigation bar using MAP (NOTE: the mail archives help link is
merely a placeholder)

2. added "top level" accesskeys, as per previous message (consult:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/wai-xtech/2001Sep/0000)

3. added a "jump-to archives" / "skip front-matter" link for which the
accesskey j has been defined, the mnemonic being "j for jump" [note: while
the accesskey could just as well be appended to the anchor at which the
"Archives" skip-nav-bar link points, support for accesskey when appended to
a name/id anchor is even less widespread than is support for accesskey in
general - comparison tests of accesskey appended to links and accesskey
appended to name/id anchors are available in GL space at:
http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/tests/accesskey1.html
and http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/tests/accesskey3.html]

4. a reformatted search form - note that the placeholder text (a required
value, if you want to limit your search to a single list - in particular,
the one in whose archives the search form appears) has been moved to a
"hidden" INPUT field, and the edit field has been provided a bone fide
LABEL; the accesskey for the search form is f, the mnemonic being "f for
find" or "f for form"

5. moved placeholder text (+listname) to a "hidden" INPUT

6. added a "summary" to the TABLE (a lingering concern is the verbosity of
the "summary" which i added to the TABLE - alternates are contained inline
in comments in the document source)

7. added id/headers referential pairings to the layout TABLE

8. changed column header from "period" to "time-span" (more accurate, i
think)

9. added "title" to links as 'appropriate'

comments and indications of changes are contained inline in the document
source.

note that the difference between the 2 files is in the placement of the
navigation bar - in the first, it is the first thing one encounters, while
in the second, it follows the de-linked W3C logo and the level 1 header (a
link to the mothership is contained in the navigation bar)

gregory

PS: both pages validate against the geraldizer and pass tidy's tests, with
but a warning about an extraneous <p> which was extant in the source which i
hacked

PPS: i started to mock up a third version of the top level, featuring a form
with a SELECT mechanism labeled "Scope", which contains 4 choices --
"[listname] only", "all W3C list archives", "W3C site and all list
archives", and "W3C site only" -- but then realized that i was replicating
the "Advanced Search" form (save for the fact that the user doesn't have to
enter "+[listname]" in order to limit the scope of the search to an
individual list -- i think "how to limit your search to a discrete list of
mailing lists" is a topic that might best be tackled in the ersatz "Mail
Archives" help document, because it isn't explicitly stated, or even
addressed, in the "Search Help" document located at
http://search.w3.org/Public/tmpl/default/help_query_body.html#general - it
appears to me that that document hasn't been customized for/by W3C, and
while it could use a good bit of work, there is one thing that needs to be
fixed immediately: ALL javascripted "href" values, such as:

<a href="javascript:popup('#simple')"><strong>simple</strong></a> and <a
href="javascript:popup('#advance')"><strong>advanced</strong></a>

need to be removed ASAP - why they are marked-up thus is a mystery to me, as
they merely point to an internal anchor, so the javascript merely opens
another (complete) copy of the document in a new viewport (if you are using
a javascript-capable browser, that is - otherwise one simply can't access
the targets via the links) - the benefits of this behavior, i think, are far
outweighed by the detriments (such as non-functioning links if support for
scripting is turned off or if the user is using a script-incapable UA)