From: Jose Kahan (jose.kahan@w3.org)
Date: Mon May 05 2003 - 12:18:37 CDT
Hello!
If you remember, in some previous mails I said I was going
to add some WAI enhancements to hypermail and that I would
send a message saying what things would change. The first step
towards this convertion was the upgrade to XHTML.
Well, I didn't send the message before because I was busy coding
them and understanding the extent of the changes! It took some time to
do them, but now they're ready!
My previous attempt had failed because there are too many archive
customization features inside hypermail (with/without table
formatting, ...) so it was hard to know what to change to keep
things compatible. I had been granted at the time the equivalent
of a "carte blanche" to change things to make them cleaner.
In a nutshell, the biggest changes are:
- Supression of the table formatting. The WAI proposal had a cleaner
way of presenting the information without using tables.
- Supression of the optional HR. No more HRs in fact! Completely done with
CSS and some additional markup for sections (div, ...)
- New configuration options to add navigation bars for your archive,
help links, include files in the headers. These are called:
ihtmlnavbar2upfile
ihtmlhelpupfile
ihtmlhelp2low
ihtmlheadfile
I made a mistake as I prefixed all these options with the letter i
which was intended for indexes. They are used for both indexes and
messages, though.
- WAI enhancements! This was the most important thing, to allow people
with visual or other handicaps an easier access to the archives.
These include: use of navigation bars, titles for all links,
access keys, quick jumping among sections, less redundant information.
For a more detailed description of the WAI enhancements, you can
consult the WAI proposal [1].
There is a price to pay for the WAI enhancements (unless we find out
a workaround): the backward compatibilty with existing archives. This
is not so serious as it sounds! I mean that when upgrading a given
period in the mail archive, hypermail uses HTML comments as internal
markers, to know which parts of old messages it should update. This
is used for example, when adding the next/previous links to messages.
I had to change the name of some of those markers because the new markup
has become completely different. This means that if you upgrade to
the new hypermail, the previous messages won't be updated to give
the new links to new messages. The indexes will be updated, though.
A solution could be to detect the previous marker name and generate
the old style of markup, but this has to be programmed.
I've generated a tar file with the current state of the changes [2]. A
second tar file gives my test .hmrc file with the new configuration
options and some sample included files [3].
There's still some (in my opinion minor) work to be done:
(
- I fixed some XHTML formatting bugs I hadn't noticed before. Including
the thread view where the lists weren't generated using the
<ul><li> model we should have used.
The only XHTML convertion bugs that need cleaning up are those
related when converting the message body to HTML (well, XHTML in fact)
rather than using a <pre>. The <p> it's adding are missing
the </p>. There may be other cases, but I haven't found them out yet.
- Code cleaning. I didn't supress yet the lines or functions that do the
table and hr formatting. We can remove them now. The setup must
give an error message saying those options are now obsolete.
- Like I said above, decide whether we want to have separate index
and message customization options or if we're going to use the
same ones and rename the new options then as needed.
- I18N. I added several new messages, but I have only done so in the
English version. I didn't add the new extra entries to the other
languages so it will crash when using them. I also didn't format
correctly the new entries (adding their name using comments). I
grouped all the new messages under a section called "WAI".
- Document the new formatting options, and write a brief WAI/XHTML
coding convention.
- More testing of course!
All in all, I think that most of the work has been done. Could the
developers and other interested party look at the tar files and see
what they think?
I must add that I won't be able to work on a daily basis on the WAI
changes until the end of May because I have a forthcoming conference
and I've to prepare a demo of another project.
Nevertheless, I hope you give me the approval to commit these new changes,
even if there's still some work to do. It'll help avoid CVS conflicts if
new patches are applied. And maybe you can help me finish the last few
details that are missing and test it a bit more,
I wait for your feedback!
Thanks for reading so far!
-jose
[1] http://www.w3.org/2002/03/archives-improvements/
[2] ftp://ftp.w3.org/pub/hypermail/hypermail+wai.tar.gz
[3] ftp://ftp.w3.org/pub/hypermail/hypermail+wai_options.tgz