Feedback sought on reorganizing the list of W3C Technical Reports

Hi,

As part of the Web site redesign, Denis, Vivien and I have been looking
at some of the approaches we could take to make the TR page easier to
consume - with a goal of bring this  as input to the redesign Studio 24
is going to bring to the page as part of the overall site redesign. This
message concludes with a short-term request for feedback .

Part of the challenge with the TR page is that we have over 1200
technical reports on the page, which makes it hard to organize and make
sense of.

Denis and I have been exploring the idea of bringing more structure to
the list by recognizing that a significant number of individual
documents can be grouped into more meaningful sets, along two main axes:
* specification series (level 1, 2, ...)
* specification "families" where a given "technology" is split in
different documents (e.g. XQuery & XSLT, OWL, RDF)

(in many cases, these "families" can be manually inferred from use of
common shortname prefixes, or common title subsets - moving forward, we
would want to put in place a more systematic approach to defining and
tracking these families)

When using this approach, and ignoring obsolete technical reports (those
currently advertised as "retired" on the TR page), a first stab at this
grouping produces ~ 280 entries (to be compared to the 1200+ full
list or TR ) which sounds like it should be easier to grasp, and in
general, help bring sense to our past and ongoing work.

The said grouping is described in
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1WlqmB1ZTUo-nqpZ-E_bMUHD_KCcHUC10c2uctsj9Cv0/edit#gid=0
(exported as attached CSV as well) - this is based on TR data obtained
on Dec 17.

Denis and I have been working on a wireframe-mockup of how a TR page
reorganized along these lines would look like:

https://cdn.statically.io/gh/w3c/tr-pages/family-grouping/family-mockup/status.html

There is naturally a lot of improvements that needs to be brought to
that design, but we thought it would help get a sense of what these
families would enable.

We're primarily (and most urgently) interested in feedback from groups
and spec authors on whether this is a reasonable way to organize the TR
page moving forward. Given the timeline constraints of the redesign
project, it would be great to get such *feedback before next Monday (Jan
18, 2021)*.

We're also interested in suggestions on how to improve the specific
classification of specs proposed in the spreadsheet (ideally, towards
reducing the number of families), but we have a lot more time for that
work, on which we expect we would iterate on a more relaxed basis if
this is indeed a viable way forward.

Thanks,

Dom