Mailing List Archives improvements: big progresses!

Hi all,

Last year (between March and June), we discussed how the W3C Mailing
List archives could be improved, both in terms of accessibility and
usability. We came up with a proposal described and defined at:
http://www.w3.org/2002/03/archives-improvements/

Thanks to the great work done by Jose Kahan, the proposed changes have
been implemented in Hypermail, the program that formats the email in
HTML and have been proposed for integration in the next releases of this
program (meaning that the progresses made for us will also be available
to a broader users base).

As promised, we have now a short time frame to make real user testing
with the output produced by the new code:
http://www.w3.org/2002/03/archives-improvements/implentation-test/ shows
what the new hypermail produces, with most of the links working as they
would in a production environment (the test was produced on the mails
received in January on www-tag). 
Al, Wendy, would it be possible for you to ask people with specific
handicaps/navigation requirements to look at these proposals and see how
well they work for them?

Some small (temporary) issues:
- the index page has not been generated for this example - the program
that produces them is not hypermail, and also can be tweaked much more
easily than hypermail, so this might wait for another round
- there are some inconsistencies in the navigation bar (ml name, broken
links) that would not appear in a real case
- the "N.B." note would not appear in a real case either

Note that in any case, and since we have had much time and many
occasions to discuss the proposals, the corrections that could be
brought to the current output cannot be very large, so we should only
try to spot out the main remaining issues.

The comments period is open until June 6 a priori, but let me know if
this is too short for you to give your feedback on this.
[FWIW, I intend to open this review slot to the chairs and the team
members after the AC Meeting]

Thanks,

Dom
-- 
Dominique Hazaël-Massieux - http://www.w3.org/People/Dom/
W3C/ERCIM
mailto:dom@w3.org