It's much prettier, and the ability to search across all the lists is
nice but of course this is the IETF so I have some questions.
When reading through messages in a thread, there's no easy way I can
see to go to the previous or next message other than to click up and
down on the list of messages. That's OK but you can't tell what
you've already read (the old version provided this sort of by accident
in browsers that change the color on links you've visited), and if
you want to go back past the current date range, you have to change
the range which loses your place. It might be worth putting some
buttons on the message pane for common navigation like forward,
back, and top of thread.
Also, in the Filter by time list at the left, it's really hard to see
which time filter is selected, probably because I'm somewhat
colorblind. It'd help if the highlight added bold or italic or
something else that doesn't depend on color.
But the most concerning is indexing, or lack thereof. When I search
for strings of message text in the archive, I find messages in the old
archive but not the new one. Is that deliberate? Looking at the new
design with javascript and frames, it seems likely that web spiders
can't find the links to the messages. There's various ways to fix
that but the easiest is probably to recognize the user agent strings
of the handful of spiders that matter (Google, Bing, Alexa for
archive.org, maybe a few others) and serve them a simplifed unframed
version of the site with links to the article pages.
R's,
John