sitem

Sitem is a term used in discussions of web data interchange to denote a hypothetical standard for representing the index of a website. In this context, a sitem would describe the site's pages and their metadata in a machine-readable form, with the aim of improving discovery, interoperability, and tooling compatibility across crawlers, content management systems, and analytics tools.

The name combines site and item, reflecting the idea that each page on a site is an individual item within a larger index. The concept appears in speculative writing and experimental tooling and is not a widely adopted protocol in real-world practice.

A sitem would typically include elements such as URL, page title, last modified date, change frequency, and priority, with optional fields for language, author, and tags. Implementations could allow hierarchical grouping or a flat list with site-wide metadata.

Proposed serializations include JSON, XML, or YAML, prioritizing compact representations that can be consumed by search engines, content management systems, and static site tooling. In current usage, Sitem remains a conceptual model rather than a standard.

Example: a minimal sitem for a small site might present the following structure: {"site": "example.com", "items": [{"url": "https://example.com/", "title": "Home", "lastModified": "2025-01-15", "changefreq": "monthly", "priority": 1.0}]}