Why no "Website" type under schema.org/CreativeWork?

I think we do need a WebSite class.  IMO, its absence was an oversight.

On Thu Mar 20 2014 at 5:05:28 PM, Aaron Bradley <aaranged@gmail.com> wrote:

> In Pinterest documention on Rich Pins [1] one finds this recommendation
> (and variations on it):
>
> "We suggest that you also include your site name using an Open Graph
> og:site_name tag. Schema.org doesn't support a site name field."
>
> This is indeed true.
>
> Perhaps this item type was considered unnecessary because of a view that a
> "website" is simply the top-level URL for any Thing.
>
> But as a creative work a website is not a URL, but a collection of URLs -
> just as the creative work that is a book is not a page, but a collection of
> pages.  And while such a type might engender confusion with other resource
> types with which it is associated, like WebPage, websites obviously exist
> as actual things out there in the world.  Just as a Book, or Photograph, or
> Movie may be referred to representationally in web content, so are websites.
>
> And while a website could also be thought of as the URL (as in the "url"
> property) of an organization (as in the "Organization" item type), a
> website can on one hand have more than owner, and the other hand an
> organization can own more than one website - each with its own URL, name,
> etc.
>
> E.g., two Microsoft websites:
>
> url:  http://support.microsoft.com/
> name:  Microsoft Support
>
> url:  http://careers.microsoft.com/
> name:  Microsoft Careers
>
> In terms of the sort of site name declaration to which Pinterest makes
> reference (a ready-made use case for the utility of a website item type)
> Open Graph - with its <meta> tag declaration method - is obviously not
> constrained by schema.org's stricture that "you should mark up only the
> content that is visible to people who visit the web page." [2]
>
> However, virtually every website ever constructed has a "home" link
> anchored either on text or an image which already declares the website URL,
> with the website name at least strongly implied.  It wouldn't seem like
> much of stretch to declare a website name here with a <meta> tag.
>
> Image link, without schema.org markup:
> <a href="http://example.com"><img src="/example-logo.png"
> alt="Example"></a>
>
> Image link, without schema.org/Website markup:
> <span itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Website">
> <a href="http://example.com" itemprop="url"><img src="/example-logo.png"
> alt="Example" itemprop="image"></a>
> <meta itemprop="name" content="Example">
> </div>
>
> Such usage would, I think, fall squarely into the realm schema.org's
> allowance for "missing/implicit information", where "a web page has
> information that would be valuable to mark up, but the information can't be
> marked up because of the way it appears on the page." [3]
>
> I keep think I'm overlooking some principle that would preclude website
> from being included in the CreativeWork schema, but I can't think of what
> that principle would be.
>
> [1] https://developers.pinterest.com/rich_pins/
> [2] http://schema.org/docs/gs.html#schemaorg_expected
> [3] http://schema.org/docs/gs.html#advanced_missing
>