w3c
groups of documents as one logical unit?
We do have loads of cases when one 'Recommendation', in the vague sense is, in fact, defined through 3-4 (or maybe even more) Recommendations. Web Annotation, RDFa, OWL, Social Web, SSML, etc, come to my mind, I am sure everyone has at least on example in her practice. I would love to have a link of the sort, say, /TR/ssml that would provide a unified view for all the relevant and interrelated specifications. Ideally, /TR/ssml/latest, /TR/ssml/upcoming, etc, would provide me all the relevant information for the constituent documents. From a more technical aspect pow, I would like to have a URL to designate, say, RDFa or SSML as a conceptual Recommendation. I would think that that lambda users search for something like that, rather than the individual Recs. The old TR made some attempt to create such groups, however incomplete and ad-hoc they are.
We could (should?), in any case, recommend groups to systematically produce a Working Group Note whose role is to serve as such first level entry point. Some groups did that in the past (see, e.g., [1], although it was probably unjustified to publish that as a Recommendation). But I have no idea how to handle that for historic document (apart from doing that manually...)
[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/owl2-overview/
@iherman, see change no. 1 here: spec-prod mailing list: “upcoming changes for W3C reports and our /TR pages” Not exactly your proposal, since that refers more to latest versions of the same spec superseding older ones, etc. But your suggested links could be an extension of that model.
I came to this issue reading that mail:-) Yes, if we have a URL for, say, SSML, then it should probably follow the same model. The question is whether the only action we can do is to try to convince WG-s that produce such family of specs to provide a note and let bygone be bygone, or whether we can do something about history.