RE: taking threads to www-archive or offline altogether

On Sat, 2007-04-14 at 15:50 -0400, Dailey, David P. wrote:
> Thanks Dan,
>  
> Just to see if I understand the reasons one might use this feature.... 
>  
> In this particular case, I think I understand what the www-archive is for, but I'm not entirely certain.
>  Therefore, rather than asking for clarification of something that, for many of the people here,
>  may be quite obvious, I could respond to you, but cc the www-archive@w3.org
>   (pretty much like I'm doing right now)?

bingo.

> I guess in this case, I am making the assumption that someone other than me might,
>  later on, find your answer valuable. (Otherwise, I suppose I would  just send you
>  a personal message without cc-ing the archive).

right. And since it's so cheap to do, the only reason not to is if
there's something sensitive/confidential that you're sending me.
 
> If I'm understanding the reason for this, then it might also make sense to be sure that
>  I quote your message in its entirety, since www-archive will not already have a copy of
>  that there. Or does it make sense to additionally provide a pointer to your
>  original message (http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2007Apr/0809.html) ? 


A pointer like you gave is extra friendly, though
it's more trouble than most people go to...


> If not, then should other context like the date, time, author, and
>  context (public-html@w3.org) be included (since it looks like groups other than
>  just public-html) are included in the archive?

It's typical to write something like
  -cc public-html +cc www-archive
at the top of the body of the message
to (a) make the switch visible to the person
you're originally writing to, and (b) leave some
cookie crumbs for others who come along later.
The "public-html" pointer isn't good enough to click
on, but combined with the threading headers
(in-reply-to/references) it's at least unambiguous.

Note that we also offer message-id redirection,
so that if you're offline and you can't (or don't
want to) find the number in the 2007Apr archive, you can just
look at your local copy of any message and find:

Message-Id: <1176567851.26252.67.camel@dirk>
or
Message-ID:
<1835D662B263BC4E864A7CFAB2FEEB3D258BBF@msfexch01.srunet.sruad.edu>

and put together a URL like:

 http://www.w3.org/mid/1176567851.26252.67.camel@dirk
or
 http://www.w3.org/mid/
1835D662B263BC4E864A7CFAB2FEEB3D258BBF@msfexch01.srunet.sruad.edu

(The lack of fully qualified domain names in my @dirk message ids
is a long-standing bug in my mail set up. I think the risk
of collision is acceptably low, though.)

Our archive software could perhaps do that automatically for
all References: header fields, but it doesn't, yet.

 
> I hope this is not inappropriate for the archive, but the http://lists.w3.org/Help/ help
>  file doesn't seem to answer these questions, unless I'm missing it.

Good point; that help page should be expanded. We have some
community-maintained notes in
  http://esw.w3.org/topic/MailingLists

Feel free to add what you're learning here to that wiki node.
Maybe lists.../Help/ should link there.

Hmm... the signature doesn't make it clear where to send
feedback... but a related document (http://www.w3.org/Mail/ )
is signed by Simon, so I'll copy him on this message.

>  
> David Dailey
> 
> Sat 4/14/2007 12:24 PM Dan Connolly wrote to public-html@w3.org:
> 
> >W3C supports a mailbox, www-archive@w3.org,  ...


-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
D3C2 887B 0F92 6005 C541  0875 0F91 96DE 6E52 C29E

Received on Saturday, 14 April 2007 20:59:47 UTC