Re: Proposed improvements to the mailing lists archives

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.

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:

- the verbosity level of the TITLEs
- the accesskey scheme

3. The skip-nav link in the 'period view' index page mockup needs a title, perhaps

from 

<a href="#first" accesskey="j">58 messages</a>

to

<a href="#first" accesskey="j" title="jump to">58 messages</a>

4. Keeping the 'by' in the table cell links and not lifting 'by' to the column head:  I would like us to stick with this.  This makes it comprehensible when tabbing through hearing just the screen text and not the title.

5. Use of the label "contemporary messages":

I agree it is awkward.  I was trying to save the implementer putting in [this month | this quarter] as appropriate.  

Furthermore @@ I don't know what to do about the following:

The actual function if your browser implements #fragment references right is to take you to "this message in date context"  and respectively " in thread context,"  "...in subject context,"  "...in author context."

It takes you not just to these indices, but to them shifted to put the current message at the origin of navigation.  The different staring point for navigation is important to understand because in speech it won't be obvious that it is the same page as arriving at the top of the page.  These links are not synonymous with the links emanating from other places, all of which start one at the top of the page.

6. The page title element for the message page should be front-loaded better [start with information specific to this message, not list-wide info]

from

<title>wai-xtech@w3.org from August 2001: Re: archive: top-level index</title>

to

<title>Re: archive: top-level index page with adjusted link text <?punctuation?/> wai-xtech@w3.org</title>

The <?punctuation?/> could be "-on-" or a dash or whatnot.

I would even consider dropping the list address from this page title.

That's what I have for now.

Received on Thursday, 28 March 2002 23:12:56 UTC