“’Cause We All Shine On!”
As blogs are appearing here and there, someone out there decided it was time to give a bit of “humanity” to this cornucopia of faceless sites. And this someone came up with XFN, a way to link to people’s site and specify your connection with those people. This can be done by simply specifying the rel in the <a> tag.
Pretty simple. Let’s take Nidhogg’s blog. If I were to use XFN to show my connections with him, the link would become:
<a href="http://stup.org/blogs/nidhogg" hreflang="en" ¶ title="Yggdrasil: Home of Nidhogg" rel="friend met" ¶ accesskey="n">Nidhogg</a>
Let’s imagine for a sec I have a crush on a Tatiana. I link to her blog, specify a rel attribute such as crush friend met. If on her side, she links to my blog with acquaintance met, there might be a chance that our blog-based relationship might not work. On the other hand, should she write that she has a crush on me as well, a web-service could alert us both about our mutual feelings and thus help us start a wonderful story.
Beyond this somewhat flowery picture, the interest of this feature is to go deeper in the linking between weblogs. So far, the existing links define and highlight a common interest (what you talk about interest me, I link to your page to show this interest, like “subscribing to a RSS feed shows a commitment to reading what someone else writes.”*). XFN describes more precisely the “nature” of this link, allowing the reader to know about the relationship between those two blogs – and therefore “analyse” the way information might be exchanged between them. Well, that’s the conclusion I came to, because otherwise, I really can’t think of what use it could be.¶
* I goddamn know I’ve read that on another blog but I just cannot find which one anymore. Sorry to the original author, I’ll do my best to find him/her back.
