How to use W3C Mailing Lists Archives

Overview

This document gathers the various features of the W3C Mailing Lists archives to allow the users of these archives to get as much as possible from them.

Generally speaking, W3C mailing lists archives are organized (gradually):

• by access restrictions, separating public, Member-only and Team-only mailing lists
• by mailing lists; each mailing list archive has a cover page (e.g. www-talk@w3.org mailing list cover page) which should describe what the purpose of the archived mailing list, give some related links
• by period of reception of the mails (e.g. the mails received in www-talk in July and August 2003), with different sorting methods:
  • by date of reception (default order)
  • by thread of discussion
  • by subject of the messages
• by message; each message is included in its own page, with details about who sent the message, when and to whom

Across these different levels:

• a common navigation bar allows to get directly from one level to an upper level or the W3C Home Page
• the h accesskey is bound to this document (help page)

Mailing lists archives cover page

Each mailing list archives cover page links to the various periods during which the messages have been archived. The periods are usually either of 1 month or 3 months, and the messages in these period can be accessed sorted by date, thread, author or subject. The number of messages received in a period is given in the fourth column of the cover page table.

Besides that, the cover page links to:

• the latest messages for this mailing list
• the mailing list search engine
• a way to send a new message to the mailing list using the <mailto:> scheme

The following accesskeys are defined:

• n for a new message
• h for the help
• f for the inputbox of the search engine

View by period

Each list of messages grouped by period links to all the messages received in the period, sorted and divided by date, by thread, by author or by subject. It also gives the number of messages received during the period, and the dates of the first and last messages received during that period.

The following accesskeys are defined:

• n for a new message
• h for the help
• d for the view sorted by date
• t for the view sorted by thread
• a for the view sorted by author
• s for the view sorted by subject
• j (as jump) for the first message in the list

Message view

Each message view contains the most important informations about the message:

• its subject as main header (and in the title of the document)
• its author (indicated by the From: header
• the date at which the message was sent
• the email addresses to whom the message was sent
• the message-id of the message (which is a unique identifier for the message)

Those informations are followed by the body of the message, with spaces and line returns preserved. Besides that, it is linked (when relevant) to:

• the next message received in the period
• the previous message received in the period
• the message in reply to which the message was sent
• the next message in the thread (limited by the current period)
• all the replies that were sent to this message in the period
• a way to respond to the message or to mail a new topic
• the lists of messages received in the current period, in the different available sorting

The following accesskeys are defined:

• h for the help
• d for next message
• t for next in thread
• r to reply to the message
• j (as jump) to go to the start of the message body

Finally, an alternate style sheet is available for the browsers that support this HTML/CSS feature, to get a shorter view of the page (without the navigation bar, with only the top links).

Hint: some email clients sent messages not formatted properly, i.e. with no wrapping of long lines, which make the archived messages hard to read; there is a handy bookmarklet for browsers supporting JavaScript that can lower this barrier.

Technicalities

The current layout of the archives has been developed during the mailing lists archives improvement project, to make them more accessible and more usable.

Most of the resulting pages are valid XHTML 1.0 Strict, styled with valid CSS.

Related documents

• Mailing List and Archive Usage @ W3C
• W3C Mailing List Administrativia
• W3C mailing-list search service
• Hypermess, the mailing lists archiving system used at W3C