Re: Proposed improvements to the mailing lists archives

At 08:27 AM 2002-04-05 , Dominique Hazaël-Massieux wrote:
>[re adding David in the CC, since he's probably not subscribed to this
>list]
>
>le ven 29-03-2002 à 05:12, Al Gilman a écrit :
>> 1. I would like to see David's hierarchical-theme navbar concept.  That probably stands between us and the next step.  Which I think of as having a whole list or at least a whole period working with multiple index pages and multiple messages cross-linked.
>
>I've implemented a first navigation bar in the current proposal: 
>	http://www.w3.org/2002/03/archives-improvements/ml-message
>	http://www.w3.org/2002/03/archives-improvements/ml-period
>	http://www.w3.org/2002/03/archives-improvements/ml-index
>
>using tabindex to make the skip link the first one on the tabbing
>navigation (mozilla unfortunately doesn't handle this well, since it
>keeps using the complete tab order even after an anchor). David, Al,
>what do you think?
> 

I think we need to get real users with disabilities and screen readers and other users to try it.  But this fits with the next item.

>> 2. I believe we still need to be able to make adjustments once we get the whole month or whole list preview of the design in place, and do some user testing in that state.  Things I am unsure of without some more user testing, and I think it would take a working model of the scale mentioned above to test:
>
>I've spoken with Jose about this: he won't be able to patch the software
>until next month. We have two solutions:
>- wait and make the mock up as good as possible in the meantime, with
>possibly first users feedback
>- someone comes up with a way to quickly transform a current archive in
>the new format with a perl script or an xslt, ...
>

My main concern is that we reserve margin (some effort reserve) for fixing some things after we implement a larger scale prototype and expose it to more testers.

In the mean time I do think that this is now good enough we can take focused questions to selected second-round testers.  If you agree.  

One known problem to mention.  The phrase "Periods list" is not good enough.  It is too hard to recognize what this means when reading it the first time, for example by tabbing through the page.  The following are synonyms, but I have yet to coin the phrase that solidly wins on combined compactness and clarity

there are two things we want to convey, a noun and an adjective

  noun ~:: index | sub-archive | message collection
  adjective ~:: by month | by quarter | periodic | for different calendar periods 

I guess my favorite as of the moment would be

  indices by [ month | quarter ]

This is of course short for "message indices grouped by [ month | quarter ]" but that much elision we can probably get away with.

Al

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

Received on Friday, 5 April 2002 15:43:43 UTC