Re: Proposed improvements to the mailing lists archives

Dom,

Okay, I hope I got this message right this time.  Again, I apologize for 
missing your reply earlier.

At 02:48 PM 3/27/2002 +0100, Dominique Hazaël-Massieux wrote:
>Regarding your navigation bar, here are my comments:
>- there is no a real hierarchical relation between http://lists.w3.org/
>, http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ and a given mailing list. Let me
>explain:
>- we don't really have a hierarchical tree in our web site, it's more a
>graph approach
>- if we wanted to make a tree navigation for the mailing lists, the real
>upper level would be more the homepage of the group owning this mailing
>list (if any). And this information should be given by the mailing list
>maintainer themselves (note that each list maintainer can create and
>update a text appearing at the very top of the mailing list).

I agree that more than one hierarchy could be used to navigate the list 
archives in various different ways.  But I don't think this means that we 
shouldn't have ANY hierarchical navigation system.  To my mind, *ANY* 
hierarchical navigation bar would be better than NONE.  Just looking at the 
URL, it looks very much like a hierarchy that is organized:

 From the list archive root:
http://lists.w3.org/
Then by access (Public, Member, Team):
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/
Then by list name:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/wai-xtech/
Then by month:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/wai-xtech/2002Mar/
Then by specific message:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/wai-xtech/2002Mar/0040.html

So a hierarchical navigation bar based on this hierarchical view would be 
easy to implement.  But I certainly don't mind if a different hierarchical 
navigation scheme is used instead.

It is true that I can (rather painstakingly) navigate through this 
hierarchy by manually editing the URL in my browser.  But this is an 
unnecessarily difficult way to do it.

It is also true that the existing message display format does have a line for:
"Other mail archives: [this mailing list] [other W3C mailing lists] "
but it is hidden among the information that pertains specifically to the 
currently displayed message, so it was over a month before I even noticed 
that it existed.  Personally, I think it is very important to visually 
distinguish the higher-level navigation from the message-specific 
information.  And I think the higher-level navigation should be in a 
consistent location on the page, at the top.

Again, thanks for your efforts on this.

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

Received on Wednesday, 27 March 2002 19:05:54 UTC