[Mailman-Developers] Improving the archives

[Terri Oda]

On 24-Jul-07, at 12:31 PM, Jeff Breidenbach wrote:
>> So we just specify a header to put it in, and subscribers will be  
>> able
>> to use it, per definition of a canonical URL.
> It is the archive server's job to decide what is the "canonical" URL
> for a message. There's a good chance these archival URLs will be
> served by an HTTP redirect. So let's not use the word canonical. :)

Someone already pointed out that the message ID is a bit long for a  
URL, so I'm guessing we're going to want some sort of shorter  
sequence number for messages for linking purposes.

Regardless of whether we *need* to generate our own unique ID, I'm  
leaning towards the thought that we're going to *want* to generate  
our own for usability reasons.  In a perfect world, i think we'd have  
a sequence number so I could visit http://example.com/mailman/ 
archives/listname/204.html and know that 205.html would be the next  
message to that list, but any short unique id would do if sequence  
numbers are too much of a pain.

It seems silly to generate nice short links but then use message-id.   
If we can generate nice short links, we might as well use 'em  
throughout, unless you really think the default use of the archive  
will be to search it by messageid (which I sincerely doubt, from my  
user experiences).

  Terri