XHTML Friends Network (XFN)
status
authors
Description
XFN enables publishers to encode in HTML, XHTML or XML markup common professional and personal relationships with other people, by means of the link element and the rel attribute.
Usage
XFN uses a set of possible values for the rel attribute. These are grouped into 7 categories. Some of these values are mutually exclusive. These desinitions come from the XFN specification.
friendship (at most one of these may appear on a single link)
- contact
- Someone you know how to get in touch with.
- acquaintance
- Someone who you have exchanged greetings and not much (if any) more — maybe a short conversation or two.
- friend
- Someone you are a friend to.
physical
- met
- Someone who you have actually met in person.
professional (someone may be both your colleague and co-worker)
- co-worker
- Someone a person works with, or works at the same organization as.
- colleague
- Someone in the same field of study/activity.
geographical (at most one of these may appear on a single link)
- co-resident
- Someone you share a street address with.
- neighbor
- Someone who lives nearby
family (at most one of these may appear on a single link)
- child
- A person’s genetic offspring, or someone that a person has adopted and takes care of.
- parent
- Inverse of child.
- sibling
- Someone a person shares a parent with.
- spouse
- Someone you are married to.
- kin
- A relative, someone you consider part of your extended family.
romantic
- muse
- Someone who brings you inspiration.
- crush
- Someone you have a crush on.
- date
- Someone you are dating.
- sweetheart
- Someone with whom you are intimate and at least somewhat committed, typically exclusively.
identity
- me (where this appears as the rel value of a link, no other XFN value is permitted)
- A link to yourself at a different URL.
Examples
<a href=”http://marxandmarzipan.com” rel=”friend met colleague neighbor”>Maxine, the co founder of westciv</a>
<a href=”http://blogs.westciv.com/dog_or_higher” rel=”me”>Also by me</a>
Tools
- Wordpress 2 has direct suport for XFN in its standard “add link” feature
- XFN Creator is an online for based tool for creating XFN links http://gmpg.org/xfn/creator
- Autoxfn is a plugin for Bloxsom http://www.scifihifi.com/weblog/software/Autoxfn.html
- The Dreamweaver microformats toolbar supports XFN http://www.webstandards.org/action/dwtf/microformats/
Services using
- Rubhub is a search engine which uses XFN to present information about the relationships between sites. http://rubhub.com
- Flickr uses XFN to publish relationships on its profile pages. http://flickr.com
- Upcoming.org uses XFN to publish user defined relationships
- Cork’s uses XFN to publish the relationships between members
