Skipping right over candidate recommendation (I guess they think this has already been implemented), the W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG) has posted the proposed recommendation of Architecture of the World Wide Web, First Edition. Quoting from the abstract:
The World Wide Web uses relatively simple technologies with sufficient scalability, efficiency and utility that they have resulted in a remarkable information space of interrelated resources, growing across languages, cultures, and media. In an effort to preserve these properties of the information space as the technologies evolve, this architecture document discusses the core design components of the Web. They are identification of resources, representation of resource state, and the protocols that support the interaction between agents and resources in the space. We relate core design components, constraints, and good practices to the principles and properties they support.
It's pretty good stuff overall. Everyone working on the Web, the Semantic Web, or with XML or URIs should read it. Even a cursory skim reveals a few surprises. For instance, apparently URIs with fragment identifiers are now considered to be full-fledged URIs, not just URI references (When did that change?) and there's no actual syntax for fragment identifiers for URIs that point to XML documents. (What happened to XPointer?) Comments are due by December 3.