W3C

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):

Across these different levels:

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Each mailing list archives cover page links to the various periods during which the messages have been archived.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 following accesskeys are defined:

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:

Message view

Each message view contains the most important informations about 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 following accesskeys are defined:

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

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