Sent by Simon Willison on 7 August 2002 11:11
Hi all,
The new, searchable, database driven css-discuss archive is now ready for a
private beta. Eric has suggested we limit it to just list members for a
short while to help iron out any last minute problems.
URL: http://archivist.incutio.com/css-discuss/
Username: css-discuss
Password: archive
The archive includes over 9,000 emails sent to the list since January 2002.
They can be accessed through a search engine (which currently returns all
mails matching all of the terms entered, Google style), by month or through
a thread view available on any messages that occur in a thread.
The software is still being very actively developed so don't be surprised
if small changes crop up over the next few days. I am very interested in
bug reports, but to avoid duplication here are a few issues I am already
aware of:
1. Most of the reply posts in August are missing the "Re." from the start
of the subject line. This is thanks to the monthly mailman archives (from
which I imported the August emails separately) not including this in the
email headers for some reason. The only fix I know of is to re-import the
whole 30MB database archive which we will do if this proves to be a problem.
2. Some messages come up with [EMAIL-REMOVED] as the name of the person who
sent the email. This is part bug, part security feature - it should only
occur on a very small number of messages.
The email masking is a very important part of the software - a principle
design target was to eliminate ALL email addresses before display, to
prevent the archive becoming a gold mine for spam bots. If you do spot an
email address in the archive please email me as a matter of urgency so I
can find out how it escaped the filter.
The site is written using structural markup in XHTML 1.0 Strict with all
layout handled by CSS. I'm keen to hear about any bugs with the CSS as
well. In addition, at Eric's suggestion I have given the body tag and ID
like this:
<body id="css-d-archive">
Those of you who like to experiment can use this to specifically target the
site with rules in a user stylesheet. One possible option for the system in
the future is the ability for people to specify the URL of the stylesheet
they would like to use (setting a cookie).
One last thing - if you are using a recent version of Mozilla be sure to
turn on the "Site Navigation Toolbar" in the View->Show/Hide->Site
Navigation Bar menu. The mailing list archive uses <link> tags in various
places to provide extra navigation tools to browsers that support them.
Please contact me off list with bug reports, feature requests and general
suggestions.
Thanks,
Simon Willison
http://www.bath.ac.uk/~cs1spw/blog/
