[FEATURE REQUEST]Lay out categories horizontally using a row container

[ChaoyiHuang]

After serveral rounds of discussion on how to reconstruct CNCF CNAI landscape to AI Native landscape, the community now almost reach consensus to lay out categories horizontally using a row container, slack links could be found at [1][2][3][4].

The draft AI Native landscape layout could be found here:

https://ai-native-landscape-preview.netlify.app/?group=ai-native-proposed
or
http://43.165.7.70:12000/?group=ai-native (if the above link become invalid)

there are three rows in the draft AI Native group landscape, refer to the following list. In the second row, there are three categories, data, training and inference; and each category contains multiple sub-categories:

• [AI Agent]
• [Data, Training, Inference]
• [AI Native Infra]

Currently landscape2 only supports laying out categories vertically, so the feature request is proposed.

The refererence implemention of rows is to configure the row layout in the settings.yml as following:

groups:
  - name: Projects and products
    alias: projects
    ...
  - name: AI Native (proposed)
    alias: ai-native-proposed
    categories:
      - AI Agent
      - Inference
      - Training
      - Data
      - AI Native Infra
    category_rows:
      - [AI Agent]
      - [Data, Training, Inference]
      - [AI Native Infra]

Reference:
[1] CNCF AI TCG channel: https://cloud-native.slack.com/archives/C08Q78J65A7/p1775118381260299
[2] CNCF AI TCG channel: https://cloud-native.slack.com/archives/C08Q78J65A7/p1772614288421669
[3] CNCF Landscapers channel: https://cloud-native.slack.com/archives/CM09QERF1/p1773198799247499
[4] CNCF Landscapers channel: https://cloud-native.slack.com/archives/CM09QERF1/p1774949382211369

[tegioz]

Hi @ChaoyiHuang 👋

Before moving forward with this, we'd like to know @caniszczyk and @jeefy thoughts about the impact something like this would have on the CNCF landscape UX.

At the moment, in the CNCF landscape, categories are represented vertically and subcategories horizontally, expanding to more rows when needed. If we added support for something like this, in the AI Native group, some categories would be organized horizontally, and their subcategories vertically (the opposite of the rest of the landscape). I've attached some screenshots below of both cases. This could be confusing for users, that could mix the concepts or even think there's some sort of categories hierarchy.

It's important to also keep in mind that forcing the landscape grid to display a specific number of rows can lead to a poor experience, depending on the data provided (i.e. number of items on each category, or subcategories, differs considerably), the device type and the browser's size. It may look nice in some cases, but don't work well in others, specially as the landscape evolves over time (more items, more subcategories, etc, leading to manual layout adjustments -or an out of sync, or broken, layout-). That's why we've always leaned towards a layout that adapts automatically to the available space.

(current)

(proposal)