Network Working Group R. Sparks Internet-Draft Oracle Intended status: Informational January 6, 2016 Expires: July 9, 2016 Requirements for Improvements to the IETF Email List Archiving, Web- based Browsing and Search Tool draft-sparks-genarea-mailarch-improvements-02 Abstract The Web-based IETF email archive search tool based on the requirements captured in RFC6778 was deployed in January 2014. This memo captures the requirements for a set of improvements that have been identified during its initial years of community use. Status of This Memo This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79. Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet- Drafts is at http://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/. Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress." This Internet-Draft will expire on July 9, 2016. Copyright Notice Copyright (c) 2016 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the document authors. All rights reserved. This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document. Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as described in the Simplified BSD License. Sparks Expires July 9, 2016 [Page 1]
Internet-Draft List Archiving and Search Requirements January 2016 Table of Contents 1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 2. List Search and Archive Tool Improvement Requirements . . . . 2 2.1. Viewing by Thread . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 2.2. Navigation from the message list view . . . . . . . . . . 3 2.3. Navigation from a single message . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 2.4. Message list UI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 2.5. Improve Support for Mobile Devices . . . . . . . . . . . 5 2.6. Improve Use of Display Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 2.7. Use without Javascript . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 2.8. Administration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 3. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 4. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 5. Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 6. Changelog . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 6.1. 01 to 02 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 6.2. 00 to 01 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 7. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 7.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 7.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Author's Address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 1. Introduction The [RFC6778] archive search tool at [mailarch] has been in use for nearly two years. During that time, there have been repeated requests for several improvements. This memo captures the requirements for a concerted development effort to provide those improvements. 2. List Search and Archive Tool Improvement Requirements 2.1. Viewing by Thread Currently, when the "Group by Thread" button is selected, the resulting list of messages is flat. It is very hard to tell where a thread starts and stops. This flat view interacts badly with sorting (triggered by clicking on the column headers), leading to results that are confusing and sometimes incorrect. This effort will: o Modify the message list display, when grouped by thread, to show each thread hierarchically. o Modify the sort performed by the clicking on the column headers to sort the overall list first by the parameters in the first message Sparks Expires July 9, 2016 [Page 2]
Internet-Draft List Archiving and Search Requirements January 2016 in the thread, and then sort within the thread (ensuring the thread grouping doesn't change based on these sorts). When viewing thread sorted this way, the hierarchy will be flattened, but the thread boundaries will remain visibly distinct. 2.2. Navigation from the message list view This effort will add navigation to the message list view, whether viewing flat search results or viewing by thread, making it simple to: o Navigate to the previous/next message by date in the set of listed messages. o Navigate to the previous/next message in a thread, to the first message in a thread, and to the previous/next thread displayed. o Navigate to any Referenced or Replies (displayed as Follow-Ups in mhonarc) for the currently selected message. These are derived from the References header field in the displayed message, and the In-Reply-To header field or last value in the References header field of of all other messages in the archive). The UI will make it possible to hide these navigation elements. 2.3. Navigation from a single message Currently, when viewing a single message, the only option for navigating to related messages is to return to the message list view (either by date or by thread). This is implemented with a new search based only on the details present in the message itself. No information about any search that led to the message is retained. This effort will: o Add navigation to the single message view, enabling transition to previous/next in list and previous/next in thread. o If the message page being displayed was arrived at by navigating from the message list view of a search result, add navigation enabling transition to previous/next in search. o Add navigation to any References or Replies (displayed as Follow- Ups in mhonarc). These are derived from the References header field in the displayed message, and the In-Reply-To header field or last value in the References header field of all other messages in the archive. Sparks Expires July 9, 2016 [Page 3]
Internet-Draft List Archiving and Search Requirements January 2016 o Make it possible to hide these navigation elements. 2.4. Message list UI It is not sufficiently obvious that the message list panel can be resized. The current handle is not visually distinct enough to signal the capability to the user, leaving many users believing they are restricted to the very short default list, even when viewing on large monitors. Additionally, there is a flaw in the code that fetches additional messages when scrolling to the bottom of what's currently displayed. If the message window is large enough that the default number of results does not fill it, no scrollbar appears, and scrolling to the bottom does not fetch additional results. The filter by list and filter by from sections to the left of the message list have no values in many circumstances, but it is not obvious why they are missing. One notable condition is when the search result is very large - computing the values to put in these filters becomes prohibitively expensive. Without foreknowledge of the decisions captured in the code, the behavior seems arbitrary and unintuitive. The current view truncates fields, leaving trailing ellipses, when it doesn't need to. This leaves space underutilized on large displays, and may make selection (particularly of long email addresses in the filters) much more difficult than it should be. On small displays, the column of filters dominates the display, leaving only a small amount of space for the actual message content. The current view requires the user to select each message in the message list to get the URI to that message. This makes it difficult to open several messages in different windows, or to build a list of URIs for use in a message or other applications. It is also not obvious that double-clicking a row in the list will open the message in a separate window. This effort will: o Make the ability to resize the panels on the message list display easier to find. o Account for the size of the message list panel when choosing how many messages to fetch, filling the panel whenever there are enough results to do so. Sparks Expires July 9, 2016 [Page 4]
Internet-Draft List Archiving and Search Requirements January 2016 o Provide a message explaining any condition leading to filter values not being populated (such as "Refine search to enable 'From' filtering"). o Allow subjects to fill the column on large displays. Show fully expanded list and email addresses in the popups for the filters. o Provide a link on each row of the list to the URL for that row's message. o Add an export type that produces a file containing a list of URIs to each message in in the list. o Add a hint to the UI that double-clicking on a row in the list will open a single-message view of the associated message in a separate view. 2.5. Improve Support for Mobile Devices The current view becomes difficult to use on small displays, particularly phone displays in portrait mode. This effort will: o Add a responsive interface, presenting a useful interface on both small and large displays. 2.6. Improve Use of Display Space The current view underutilizes the available display space. This effort will: o Make the message content the primary point of each view. o Reduce the unused space on the display. o Remove the filter column responsively when the display width is small. 2.7. Use without Javascript The current web-based archive search tool requires javascript to function. This effort will extend the tool to allow users that have disabled javascript in their browser to retrieve and navigate through search results using the message list and single message views. This effort will not attempt to preserve all of the functionality provided with javascript enabled. In particular, when running with javascript disabled, these features will not be available: Sparks Expires July 9, 2016 [Page 5]
Internet-Draft List Archiving and Search Requirements January 2016 o Resizing of the message list panels o Dynamically filter by time, list, or from. (The filter column will not appear). 2.8. Administration This project will: o When logged in as an administrator, add a link from the message view to the admin page for the message. o Add correction of the appropriate thread indices to the handling of administrative imports of messages. o Implement a redirection handler mapping legacy archive URLs to the appropriate mailarch page. o Make the underlying template consistent across all views presented by the tool. In particular, ensure the correct IAOC designated logo appears consistently on all views. 3. Security Considerations The requirements for improvement to the mailarch tool captured in this document do not introduce any exceptional security considerations. They add additional navigation points, and the implementers should consider the impact of rapid navigation using these new mechanisms (see the security considerations of [RFC6778]). 4. IANA Considerations This document has no actions for IANA. 5. Acknowledgments The following people have provided particularly useful input for this document: Lou Berger, Chris Bowers, Brian Carpenter, Russ Housley, Pete Resnick, Dale Worley. If you've provided input, and are not listed here, please send the editor a reminder and accept apologies in advance. 6. Changelog RFC Editor - please remove this section when formatting this document as an RFC. Sparks Expires July 9, 2016 [Page 6]
Internet-Draft List Archiving and Search Requirements January 2016 6.1. 01 to 02 1. Minor reordering to make improving the experience for mobile devices explicit, and a top level section. 2. Added requirements focused on easily obtaining URLs for the individual messages from a message list. 3. Added requirements to allow navigating to References and Replys 6.2. 00 to 01 1. Restructured requirements to clarify when new navigation elements would be available. 2. Added a requirement to be able to hide the new navigation elements. 3. Added explicit requirement for a responsive view addressing use on small devices. 4. Corrected typo in references. 7. References 7.1. Normative References [RFC6778] Sparks, R., "Requirements for Archiving IETF Email Lists and for Providing Web-Based Browsing and Searching", RFC 6778, DOI 10.17487/RFC6778, October 2012, <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc6778>. 7.2. Informative References [mailarch] "Mailarch", November 2015, <https://mailarchive.ietf.org>. Author's Address Robert Sparks Oracle 7460 Warren Parkway Suite 300 Frisco, Texas 75034 USA Email: rjsparks@nostrum.com Sparks Expires July 9, 2016 [Page 7]
