Improved thread navigation in W3C's mailing list archives

The IT/Systems Operations team has the dual function of developing and supporting the technical infrastructure required to enable and operate the work of our consortium, and the tools and environments that enable participation from around the world to contribute to our technical program.

In this series, we focus on communicating incremental improvements to our tooling.

W3C's mailing list archives contain millions of messages dating back to the earliest days of the web. Our archives are generated using hypermail, which is open source software that generates a web view of email messages plus some extra indexes by date, subject, author and thread.

This month we updated our archives to add an experimental thread panel to the message pages, intending to allow for a clearer view of the thread structure as well as easier navigation within a thread. You can also opt to display entire threads inline on a single page instead of viewing messages one at a time.

To enable this thread panel, look for a gear icon near the top right of the page while viewing a message in our archives (note: this requires JavaScript to be enabled in your browser). Clicking the icon will reveal an extra panel that shows thread details for the current message, with an option at the top to switch between Classic and Flattened views.

The goals of this implementation are to:

• provide a convenient way to navigate within threads without requiring changes to hypermail or compromising its features (fast, static HTML; clean, stable URLs)
• allow users to set their own viewing preferences (thread panel displayed or not; Flattened view enabled or not) while sharing a common URL space.
• avoid running dynamic or expensive scripts on our servers; stick with the highly cacheable static files we have always used for our list archives.
• continue to allow message permalinks to be shared simply by copying and pasting from the browser location bar – no need to look for a "share" or "create permalink" feature.
• allow for seamless switching between Classic and Flattened views.
• provide a complete view of threads that span hypermail's period boundaries.

Please try it out and send any feedback you have either via email or by opening an issue on the w3c-website repo on GitHub.