[Mailman-Developers] Improving the archives

[Barry Warsaw]

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On Jul 24, 2007, at 2:03 PM, Jeff Breidenbach wrote:

>> 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.
>
> I agree there's a lot of usability benefits from short URLs, but  
> perhaps
> this is the job of the archive server, and not the list server.  
> Mharc (an
> archive server) is a great example here. Mharc's canonical message
> format is pretty human friendly.
>
> http://ww.mhonarc.org/archive/html/mharc-users/2002-08/msg00000.html
>
> Unfortunately, there's no trivial way for the list server to know  
> that human
> friendly URL when the message is sent out. Fortunately, Mharc is also
> happy handles messages by message-id, which the list server does know
> about.
>
> http://www.mhonarc.org/archive/cgi-bin/mesg.cgi?a=mharc- 
> users&i=200208010532.g715W0e31774 at gator.earlhood.com
>
> Had I been the implementer, I'd probably have made mharc do an HTTP  
> 302
> redirect from the longer URL to the shorter URL. But that's besides  
> the point.
> The point is we have an existing, working, happy archival server,  
> and it would
> be really nice if list servers (such as mailman) were compatible.  
> And by
> compatible, I mean offering the capability of embedding an archival  
> URL in the
> footers of messages.

I agree, I just don't think message-ids are user friendly enough to  
be this canonical url.  Especially in this context, which is exactly  
where urls are thrown in users faces.  An archiving service is  
exactly the right place for redirecting human readable urls to the  
archiver's canonical url (by, I agree, 302).

- -Barry

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