XHTML Friends Network (XFN)
The web is more a social creation than a technical one. I designed it for a social effect — to help people work together — and not as a technical toy. The ultimate goal of the Web is to support and improve our weblike existence in the world. We clump into families, associations, and companies. We develop trust across the miles and distrust around the corner.
—Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving The Web
Millions of people now have personal web sites/blogs especially after the lunch of Blogger, XFN is simple powerful way to identify your relationship with people among the web.
By adding values like muse, friend, colleague to the rel attribute of the anchor tag, it is now known that this person is your friend or your colleague etc...
For example:
<p>I was reading <a href="http://www.molly.com/" rel=" muse colleague acquaintance">Molly</a> thoughts for the last 6 years.</p>
Imagine what could be done after that, you could check who consider himself your friend, who have a crush on you or who is the most inspiring person on the web.
See the list of XFN values and there meanings.
To join the XHTML Friends Network follow these steps.
August 15, 2005, 08:15 AM | Web standards , XHTML