Good Lists are Hard

being a web plumber, one of pages i visit almost daily is the technical reports (TR) page of the W3C at http://www.w3.org/TR/. when this page was updated last week (as part of the launch of the new W3C site), it was amazing to see how many things you can break at the same time, and it also was an interesting lesson in how simple and smart design can be much more usable and useful than just adding functionality.

the old TR was a good web page in a variety of ways. it was lightweight, had a completely noise-free design, had all the recent updates on top as shortcuts to the complete listings further down, and in short was a well-designed and self-contained representation of the TR work done by the W3C. you could go there, quickly see up the latest additions with your browser clearly highlighting the pages you had not yet visited, and do everything else with the browser's find function. it was one of the pages i always showed to people when explaining why simple and smart is often better than just adding fluff without properly considering usability and utility.

the new TR page managed to break almost everything that was useful, and it does so in a variety of ways. it removed the previously smart quick/complete combined view, it added a lot of visual noise, and it breaks the previously correct usage of the W3C's spec URIs. here is where the new design fails:

• quick view plus complete info. one of the useful things of the old page was the fact that it had a short recent specs section at the beginning, and complete listings further done. it was a very elegant way to both have a quick view of what's new, and a complete view of everything, all available via simple browser-based search. now there are more options, but none of those is as useful as the old view, which is not available anymore.
• useless layout noise. the layout of the old page was simple yet effective, putting as much information in one browser window as possible. the new layout contains a lot of useless layout noise such as horizontal lines between each line, plus a lot of spacing surrounding the text and the lines. it probably doubles the space required per item, while also listing less information. using a table costs even more space without adding any value to the presentation.
• proper URI handling. W3C specs have versioned as well as canonical URIs, and the old TR page linked to the versioned URIs, which is the right thing to do, because the TR page contains a date-based of specs, and not a list of canonical URIs of the latest versions of all specs. the new page links to the canonical URIs, essentially linking to something other than the resource it is actually listing on the TR list. this even breaks basic principles of REST, where the pages users are GETting don't properly link to the resources they are referring to; instead they are referring to a canonical URI that does not represent the actual document that has been published. the very real consequence of this particular breakage is that the browser cannot reliably color the links based on whether the URIs of the particular versions are in the history or not.

in summary, it would be interesting to know whether the new TR has undergone any internal usability and utility testing before being released. it is broken in a variety of ways, which is kind of interesting, but from the perspective of a regular user, it really is sad to see that a page as useful and well-designed as the old TR page is being replaced by a much more noisy and much less useful version. i will certainly miss the old TR, and i guess so will others who were closely following the W3C's TR work.

if you think the old TR was better, please leave a brief +1 comment here, and maybe it will at least come back as a classic view for those who like web pages that are simple and effective.

Comments

[Jodi Schneider]

+1

Ouch! Here's an example "before" page for the curious and/or forgetful:
http://web.archive.org/web/20070304204756/http://www.w3.org/TR/