XFN, the FOAF alternative
April 7th, 2004 • General
For anyone who truly believes the Web isn’t just a huge library of information, but also a social network, XFN is the thing for you.
Now FOAF is good, actually, anything that works is good. But personally I tend to move away from complexity whenever I can, and XFN gives me just that.
So what in the world is XFN? To put it simply, it’s a way to describe relations when linking to someone else, it’s how you specify whether this person you’re linking to is your friend, colleague, family, whether you two met or not, and other kinds of things.
It’s also XHTML compliant, it sits there in a rel attribute of an <a> element. XFN has some keywords which are used to specify the kind of relationship.
For instance, I’d like to say that John Coggeshall is my friend, I can link to his web site like this <a href=”http://www.coggeshall.org” rel=”friend”>… it’ll be much easier than adding an FOAF RDF file describing my relation with him.
The advantages:
- It’s standard compliant
- Any XML parser can simply ignore this value
- Any XFN-aware parser can use this to map relations
- It’s found withing the context, not external links
- It’s much easier to implement
- It just looks nice
I was planing to use FOAF, but XFN is just to tempting for me, so I guess I’ll be adding XFN-friendliness into my website pretty soon.
For more information, visit the website: http://www.gmpg.org/xfn/.
2 Responses (Add Your Comment)
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Well, the good thing about XFN is that it isn’t too complex. I agree that FOAF should be kept in use, and that XFN might be transformed into FOAF. Most of the times you don’t need to say that John is the creator of http://www.coggeshall.org, with XFN you’re trying to say that you can find John at that website, and he’s my friend.
Maybe it’s a too simplistic approach, but it implements the 20% that 80% of people use.
Reply ↵
I agree there’s a lot of potential in XFN, but to do worthwhile things with the rels you’ll benefit from a model like FOAF’s. Sure, put XFN in the HTML, but it’s worthwhile transforming it into FOAF when you want to join up with other bits of information.
I’m also a little skeptical of what you can actually say in XFN – ok, you’ve said John’s your friend here. Now how do you say your friend is the creator of http://www.coggeshall.org? The syntax looks good, but I could be wrong, it looks like the semantics have been simplified a step too far.