contact acquaintance friend met co-worker colleague co-resident neighbor child parent sibling spouse kin muse crush date sweetheart me…
XFN stands for XHTML Friends Network. It is a simple way to enhance hyperlinks with social information. In other words, XFN provides information about your relationship with the person you are hyperlinking to, thus providing an alternative vision of the web.
Generally (and I could almost write originally, as it will become clear further), the Internet is seen as a vast amount of data, interconnected by ways of hyperlinks. Any website out there uses hyperlinks, were it only to link its own information. In practice, hyperlinks are used beyond that: to cite sources, to list related information, etc.
That being said, there is such a thing as too much data. Nowadays, research is not done the way it used to be done, say 15 years ago. Unless you are a teenager, you know what I mean: to complete your assignment, you had to go to libraries and find the relevant information. Today, finding is not a problem, any search engine returns results in a matter of milliseconds. But now, the focus is on sorting through the relevant information. In an attempt to make their lives easy, people go to a few web portals, web directories, and perhaps to authoritative websites, to look for links to other sources. However, we know little of the relation a major website hub has with the websites it is referring to.
Before proceeding any further, let me tell you of metadata, or data about data. Take a picture, for example: when was it taken? with what camera? what focal and speed? How does the author classify the picture? As you can see, the more data you have, the more information about said data you will need. Because this metadata is what will help sort your information later on. Would it be possible to apply metadata to a hyperlink? That would be convenient! Why is a web author linking to another website? Because it is informative, funny, or because the data is hosted by someone he knows? While XFN does not answer all these questions, it tackles the social aspect of hyperlinking by defining the human contact.
How does it work? First, you must add a profile attribute to your head tag, like this: profile="http://gmpg.org/xfn/11"
Then it is simply a question of adding a rel attribute to the a tag you want to describe. For example, The New Educated Village Boy in my blogroll has a rel attribute of friend. For the different XFN values and documentation, go to the XFN specification website. Incidentally, FCP also tagged me as friend, making the relation reciprocal.
How can I see what is the rel value of a hyperlink? Well, Firefox lets you easily see the relation with a simple right-click on the hyperlink. But a more convenient way is to go to rubhub.com and enter an URL you are interested in to see all of the underlying relations. See the Construct’s relations for an example. The great thing about this, is that now, you can hop from website to website, checking on friends, colleagues, and so on.
There are many functionalities that could be performed with this feature, but I will leave your mind run wild for a while. If you find interesting ideas, or have questions about this simple protocol, feel free to share and deconstruct. I hope you learned something useful and that you are ready to join the XFN bandwagon. Get tagging!