Provide a way to discover associated meta sites

Question

Currently, the API doesn't specify what the associated Meta site is for a certain site (I'm talking about the stackauth.com/1.0/sites route). Sure, we could just prepend "meta." to the domain name, but that's not entirely reliable (it might be now, but it might not be in the future). I'm thinking about two possible solutions for this. Either include the meta site as a child of its parent site, like so:

"api_sites": [
    {
        "name": "Stack Overflow",
        "logo_url": "http://sstatic.net/stackoverflow/img/logo.png",
        "api_endpoint": "http://api.stackoverflow.com",
        "site_url": "http://stackoverflow.com",
        "description": "Q&A for professional and enthusiast programmers",
        "icon_url": "http://sstatic.net/stackoverflow/img/apple-touch-icon.png",
        "state": "normal",
        "styling": {
            "link_color": "#0077CC",
            "tag_foreground_color": "#3E6D8E",
            "tag_background_color": "#E0EAF1"
        },
        "meta": {
            "name": "Meta Stack Overflow",
            "logo_url": "http://sstatic.net/stackoverflowmeta/img/logo.png",
            "api_endpoint": "http://api.meta.stackoverflow.com",
            "site_url": "http://meta.stackoverflow.com",
            "description": "Q&A about the Stack Exchange engine powering these sites",
            "icon_url": "http://sstatic.net/stackoverflowmeta/img/apple-touch-icon.png",
            "state": "normal",
            "styling": {
                "link_color": "#3D3D3D",
                "tag_foreground_color": "#6F6F6F",
                "tag_background_color": "#E7E7E7"
            }
        }
    },
    // ...
]

...or just include the endpoint of the meta site in the main site (and viceversa?):

"api_sites": [
    {
        "name": "Stack Overflow",
        "logo_url": "http://sstatic.net/stackoverflow/img/logo.png",
        "api_endpoint": "http://api.stackoverflow.com",
        "site_url": "http://stackoverflow.com",
        "description": "Q&A for professional and enthusiast programmers",
        "icon_url": "http://sstatic.net/stackoverflow/img/apple-touch-icon.png",
        "state": "normal",
        "styling": {
            "link_color": "#0077CC",
            "tag_foreground_color": "#3E6D8E",
            "tag_background_color": "#E0EAF1"
        },
        "meta": "http://api.meta.stackoverflow.com"
    },
    {
        "name": "Meta Stack Overflow",
        "logo_url": "http://sstatic.net/stackoverflowmeta/img/logo.png",
        "api_endpoint": "http://api.meta.stackoverflow.com",
        "site_url": "http://meta.stackoverflow.com",
        "description": "Q&A about the Stack Exchange engine powering these sites",
        "icon_url": "http://sstatic.net/stackoverflowmeta/img/apple-touch-icon.png",
        "state": "normal",
        "styling": {
            "link_color": "#3D3D3D",
            "tag_foreground_color": "#6F6F6F",
            "tag_background_color": "#E7E7E7"
        },
        "meta_for": "http://api.stackoverflow.com"
    },
    // ...
]

I think this would be pretty useful.

Answer 1

I agree that there does need to be a way to link a site to its Meta, but I question your solution. What if someone wants to enumerate only Metas? What happens if an API for the chat.xxx sites gets created?

Answer 2

The new /1.1/sites route returns a related_sites collection.

Parent/meta relations are indicated with a relation of "parent" or "meta". Note that new relation types can be added at any time, but the meaning of them once added is guaranteed to be stable.