At this month’s South Bay Blogger Meeting as well as the Geek Dinner the other night, a hot topic of discussion is the XHTML Friends Network, or XFN. Thanks to Tantek, Matthew and Eric, we have a new and simple way to indicate the relationships between the humans behind the blogs. Simply put:
XFN (XHTML Friends Network) is a simple way to represent human relationships using hyperlinks. In recent years, blogs and blogrolls have become the fastest growing area of the Web. XFN enables web authors to indicate their relationship(s) to the people in their blogrolls simply by adding a ‘rel’ attribute to their tags…
The integration is easy, and the potential is great. I am not necessarily writing off other social networking methods, but XFN seems to be the simplest method. As Tantek put it the other night, why spend time entering all your information into several third party social networking sites when you can do it all on your own site?
I hope you will give XFN a chance so we can see it grow. The best way to test this out is to get everyone to use it… so do it now!
Szczesliwego Nowego Roku!!!
Not impressed. The idea is sound (ish) but the suggested implementation is terrible. For a start there is no way of indicating that someone is a person that you have never met, know almost nothing about but whose website you read – that is an extremely common relationship and it is missing. Also I don’t see how this does anything useful until browsers do something with the data. Is there any evidence that the attributes may get used in the future or a legal requirement to use them (like accessibility tags)? If not then why load your pages up with more stuff that people can’t see? Bottom line – you can’t sum up human relationships this simply.
Seems like a clever idea and It can be worked upon inmensely, doing a CROSS RSS Feeds and XFN project would be awesome… pondering about it…
Hmmm, I need to lay off the eggnog. There’s indeed a rel=”"
I humbly apologize.
What’s the URL for the South Bay Blogger Meeting?
Antonio,
I agree, there is great potential in mixing XFN info into RSS/ATOM feeds.
Lindsey,
Why is the implementation “terrible”? That’s awfully harsh if all you mean is that you would like to see more relationship descriptions. If you’ve never met someone, you simply omit the “met” value. As far as a value for “someone whose website you read”, that is a value we considered initially, but dropped from the core set because it wasn’t really “social”. However, your feedback is valid and I’m sure we’ll consider such a value for the future.
As far as displaying your XFN info, the most common thing that people do is to put a “*” next to the people they have met. With XFN, you can do this using CSS instead, and then change the effect at a later date just by changing a style rule, rather than having to go touch a bunch of pages and links.
You can also do things like *bold* your friends, or _italicize_ your coworkers etc. For more ideas on how to present the XFN info on your XFN friendly pages, check out the intro: http://gmpg.org/xfn/intro
And if you think the values in XFN are simpler than you’d like, why not try using them and then come up with suggested additions? We’re certainly open to feedback.
Tantek
Damn. Last night I posted a long explanation of why I thought the implemenation is “terrible” and it doesn’t seem to have been saved. Grrrr. Very brief summary:
1) It’s verbose
2) It’s anglocentric
3) It breaks xhtml which defines the valid values for the rel field.
4) It seems ot be focussed on the relationship patterns of rather a small set of internet people. These are not mirrored in other communities – certainly none of the ones I know of anyway.
L.
Lindsay,
In response to your first three points, the answer is: No, XFN is consistent with HTML/XHTML. In particular:
>1) It’s verbose
1. Words are easier than codes.
If you look at the values for rel in HTML4, you will see that the
values are all (with the exception of “prev”) complete words , just like the XFN values.
XFN was also designed to appeal to typical bloggers, not just geeks. Thus using complete self-describing words for the values makes a lot more sense than some cryptic code. It’s both easier to remember the XFN values and their meanings without having to look them up in some codebook.
>2) It’s anglocentric
2. HTML tags, attributes and values are in English.
If you are referring to the fact that the XFN values are English words, that is because that is how HTML was designed, and XFN sought to be consistent with HTML. If you look at the values for rel in HTML4, you’ll see that they are all English words. If you want to criticize HTML for this, that’s a different topic of discussion, one which has been well discussed on W3C mailing lists. I’d suggest researching it there if you would like to explore it further.
Of course the HTML code is only a starting point, and just like there are HTML tools for many natural languages, we expect the same to appear for XFN as well. In fact, Manuel Razzari from Argentina has already graciously donated a Spanish version of the XFN Creator, titled appropriately Creador de XFN. I think a Chinese version is in the works also.
>3) It breaks xhtml which defines the valid values for the rel field.
3. HTML encourages authors to extend the rel attribute
XFN doesn’t break HTML/XHTML at all. In fact, it is the HTML4 specification itself which allows for introducing new rel values like those in XFN. If you scroll to the end of section 6.12 of the HTML4.01 specification, you can see that HTML explicitly encourages authors to add new link types for the rel attribute, and says how to do so:
>4) It seems ot be focussed on the relationship patterns of rather a small set of internet people. These are not mirrored in other communities – certainly none of the ones I know of anyway.
4. XFN was designed to be simple, yet universal, from the start.
We previewed XFN with a culturally diverse set of individuals, and the set of values we came up with were the ones that survived the criticism. We kept the list short for simplicity’s sake. In fact, the list is short enough to naturally commit to memory after a few repeated uses.
Certainly XFN was designed in particular for bloggers to easily use in their blogs and blogrolls, thus it is “Web-centric” in that respect.
However, the values are quite independent of the Web. Everyone has parents, most folks have siblings, neighbors, colleagues etc.
If you think we have omitted some common relationship type, we’d love to hear your suggestions for new values.
2003 gets the boot…
Well 2003 is over and all of the joys and memories of it are stored in some data cluster inside one of my hard drives, well at least for the moments that have pictures, and the really really priceless ones…