[Mailman-Developers] RFC 5064 Archived-At header

[Barry Warsaw]

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On Jul 3, 2008, at 2:11 AM, Earl Hood wrote:

> On July 3, 2008 at 00:57, Barry Warsaw wrote:
>
>> I've just updated the current proposal on the Mailman wiki:
>>
>> http://wiki.list.org/x/yQAM
>>
>> See specifically the Open Issues section.  The most straight-forward
>> way to implement this leads to long, unusable (in our opinion) urls.
>> Shortening the urls would require quite a bit of additional
>> implementation complexity.  What to do?
>
> Quick editorial comment: in the "Open issues" section, you write:
>
>  "... Mail-Archive.com uses MHonArc which requires the use of the
>  list name in the url."
>
> This is misleading wrt mhonarc.  Mhonarc imposes no requirement on
> how an archive is structured on the file system from a pathname
> perspective.  The convention is something imposed by the user.

Thanks Earl.  Fixed.

> As for "readable URLs", I still think it may be a bogus concern.
> Usability testing would have to be done to verify if this concern
> is real.

I've clarified that this claim hasn't been tested.

> Wrt this context, it seems most will "click" on the URL in the mail
> message, or copy-n-paste it.
>
> And even then, I wonder how much the link will actually get used.
> Will someone provide some real use case scenarios of how the
> archived-at URL gets used by a message receipient.  If I have
> the message locally, do I care where it is archived?

Yes.  Archived messages are referenced all over the place, in forum  
posts and wiki pages to name a few.  Another use case is referring to  
the message in other mailing list discussions.  E.g. I'd like to point  
mhonarc-devs at the start of the original thread months ago on mailman- 
developers.

Right now, if I have a message in one of my folders, it is often quite  
difficult to find the url that the message is archived.

> One reasonable case I can think of is if a receipient wants
> to tell others about the message, and instead of forwarding
> the message they got, they just send a URL to it, which would
> allows others to following subsequent follow-ups if they are
> not subscribed to the list.

One thing I've dreamed about in an archiver is a "mail this to me"  
link in the archived message.  This would allow me for example, to  
jump start the thread in my mail reader.  So if you were to send me  
the archived-at url for a message in mhonarc-dev, I'd follow that in  
my browser, click the "mail this to me" link and it would show up in  
my inbox, where I can use all my MUA goodness on it.

> Or, they bookmark the link so they can always go back to the
> message w/o having to archive in their local MUA.
>
> Either scenario implies the user can either do a couple of clicks
> or just copy-n-paste the URL to their bookmark manager.
>
> This implies the archive-at URL is mainly for bookmarking purposes.   
> I.e.
> I go to the archive and read some messages (or got their via a  
> search).
> I see a message of interest, and want to bookmark it so I can go back
> to it directly.

You may be right that the readability argument is specious.  It may be  
that cut-n-paste is the overwhelming use case for archived-at.  Does  
that mean you'd argue for the slightly shorter base64 encoding of the  
hash?

> P.S. When time permits, I will look into mhonarc to see if it can
> be changed so the filenames it uses for messages can be based on
> Stable URL since stable filenames has been a problem for mhonarc.

That would be awesome.  Stable URLs on archive regeneration are really  
the core impetus for all this, though the discussion has (rightly)  
diverged a bit since then.

- -Barry

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