Web Design in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

XHTML Friends Network

Since the previous edition of this book, blogs and the larger blogging phenomenon have taken the Web by storm. As of this writing, there were approximately 22.6 million blogs according to real-time search engine Technorati (http://technorati.com). Many of these bloggers publish lists of links to blogs they themselves read, called blogrolls . Some indicate the relationship to the people in their blogrolls using symbols, such as asterisks (*) next to people they have met. Typical blogrolls are published as a list of hyperlinks:

<ul>
 <li><a href="http://molly.example.com">Molly*</a></li>
 <li><a href="http://jeff.example.com">Jeff*</a></li>
</ul>

In 2003, a few web developers proposed a standard called the XHTML Friends Network (XFN) for explicitly indicating social relationships using new rel attribute values on blogroll links. In the above example, to indicate that Molly is a colleague you have met and Jeff is a friend you have also met, simply add XFN values to rel attributes:

<ul>
 <li><arel="colleague met" href="http://molly.example.com">Molly</a></li>
 <li><a rel="friend met" href="http://jeff.example.com">Jeff</a></li>
</ul>

For a full list of XFN relationship values and more information on using XFN, see the XFN home page at http://gmpg.org/xfn/.