Re: Mailing list archives: feeback requested on proposedimprovements (3: messages)

From: "Dominique Hazaël-Massieux" <dom@w3.org>
> > There's no reason to include the message headers in the <pre>. Only the
body
> > of the message needs to be <pre>.

> Hmmm... I'm not sure I agree. I like the idea of having most of the
> email preserved as is in the <pre> tag. Could you give more input on
> this?

Oh, I'm very sure of this one. The only reason that mail messages need to be
in monospace is that some people do layout with whitespace. Monospace is a
relatively difficult-to-read font; proportional spaced fonts are always
easier to read. However, there is nothing in the headers that require you to
display them in monospace. Therefore, to make a more readable page, you
should minimise the amount in monospace by displaying the headers in
proportional.

See my example at http://www.cwi.nl/~steven/w3c/lists/ml-message.html (I
also reduced the size of the Message-id line, because it contains no
readable information, but you might want to refer to it on rare occasions.)

(In an ideal world I would like to choose per email if it is in a <pre> or
not. Look at
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Member/w3c-html-wg/2002JanMar/0380.html and
weep).

> Your version is interesting, but some things won't work in production
> mode: for instance, a message can have several "Next" and "Next in
> thread" messages: how would you incorporate them in one list?

I don't think I ever saw more than one [next]; I have seen more [reply]s
though. What's hard about
    [next] [previous] [in reply to] [next in thread] [reply] [reply] [reply]

?

> General comments on navigation.
>
> I note that the hierarchy of the lists are as follows:
>
> 1: Archives (many lists)
> 2: List (one particular list)
> 3: Sorted view (by author, by date, etc)
> 4: Message.
>
> Looking at the navigation you can always get from level n to level n+1.
>
> You can get from 4 to 3
> You can get from 4 to 1
> You can get from 3 to 1
>
> But you can't get from 4 to 2
>, from 3 to 2,

> yes, you can. The link "this list, more time" is supposed to link to 2
> in 3 and 4.
Are you sure? Because of the word 'more', I assumed it meant a different
version of level 3. (I couldn't try it because the link didn't work).

> I don't think that there is a so strong relationship between 2 and 1.
> See my reply to David's mail:
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/wai-xtech/2002Mar/0028.html

But I thought David's suggestions were really good. I think there is a
strong relationship between all the levels, and I use them all (and would
use the missing ones if I could, and often get annoyed that I can't navigate
easily to level 2).

Best wishes,

Steven

Received on Thursday, 28 March 2002 07:14:11 UTC