I have an action item from theW3C TAG to expand mystrawmanwriteup on ourSite Dataissue. I’ve written about this problem before:There’s No Such Thing as aWeb Site.I’m going to do it here because this is a better writing environmentand because I think the issue is of general interest (if by “generalinterest” we mean to heavy Web geeks).

Introduction · AWeb Site is a Web Resource, identified by URI, which is acollection of other Web Resources, each identified by URI.

The two chief objectives to be met by Web Sites are:

1. A location of the publisher’s choice for thestorage of site metadata, including for example robot control information,graphical icons, and privacy policies.

2. Providing a logical grouping mechanism for web pages, for the supportof search and content management applications.

Web Site Membership · When a resource is included in the collection of resources that constitutea Site, we say the resource is amember of the Site.A resource may be a member of any number of Sites: zero, one, or many.

A representation of a resource may include assertions of membership inone or more Sites.A representation of a Site may include the assertion that one or moreresources are members of that Site.Clearly, inconsistencies and disagreements can arise; software is free toestablish its own policies for dealing with them.

Resource Representations and Site Membership · A resource representation can assert Site membership in either itsmetadata or data.For example, a header could be added to the HTTP protocol,Website:, which specifies a URI and asserts the resource’smembership in that Site.A representation could include multipleWebsite: headers.

Designers of any language used in resource representations could include amethod for a representation to assert membership in a site.For example, a new value of therel attribute of XHTML’slink attribute could serve this purpose.

Site Representations · For the notion of a Site to be useful, it would be necessary to establish an expectation that it would provide representations in apredictable and useful data format.This format should meet the following goals:

1. It should be human-readable.

2. It should contain assertions that individual resources are members ofthe site.

3. It should contain assertions that groups of resources identified by URIprefix are members of the site.

4. It should contain the identification of per-site metadata, probablyidentified by “Nature” and “Purpose” in the style ofRDDL.