
Remark 7.6.3. (On set theoretic issues – skip on a first reading.) The main reason for introducing sites is to study the category of sheaves on a site, because it is the generalization of the category of sheaves on a topological space that has been so important in algebraic geometry. In order to avoid thinking about things like “classes of classes” and so on, we will not allow sites to be “big” categories, in contrast to what we do for categories and $2$-categories.

Suppose that $\mathcal{C}$ is a category and that $\text{Cov}(\mathcal{C})$ is a proper class of coverings satisfying (1), (2) and (3) above. We will not allow this as a site either, mainly because we are going to take limits over coverings. However, there are several natural ways to replace $\text{Cov}(\mathcal{C})$ by a set of coverings or a slightly different structure that give rise to the same category of sheaves. For example:

1. In Sets, Section 3.11 we show how to pick a suitable set of coverings that gives the same category of sheaves.

2. Another thing we can do is to take the associated topology (see Definition 7.48.2). The resulting topology on $\mathcal{C}$ has the same category of sheaves. Two topologies have the same categories of sheaves if and only if they are equal, see Theorem 7.50.2. A topology on a category is given by a choice of sieves on objects. The collection of all possible sieves and even all possible topologies on $\mathcal{C}$ is a set.

3. We could also slightly modify the notion of a site, see Remark 7.48.4 below, and end up with a canonical set of coverings.

Each of these solutions has some minor drawback. For the first, one has to check that constructions later on do not depend on the choice of the set of coverings. For the second, one has to learn about topologies and redo many of the arguments for sites. For the third, see the last sentence of Remark 7.48.4.

Our approach will be to work with sites as in Definition 7.6.2 above. Given a category $\mathcal{C}$ with a proper class of coverings as above, we will replace this by a set of coverings producing a site using Sets, Lemma 3.11.1. It is shown in Lemma 7.8.6 below that the resulting category of sheaves (the topos) is independent of this choice. We leave it to the reader to use one of the other two strategies to deal with these issues if he/she so desires.

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