kartooner.com

XFN is a simple way to represent human relationships using hyperlinks. It is essentially a method of building a network of links indicating your relationship with that particular person or company you’ve linked to.

I’ve implemented XFN and proudly display the button on the sidebar. It is something I’ve been kicking around for a while because I wasn’t educated as to what XFN’s purpose was. Not until I read ‘Friend, XFN and Hyperlinks‘ by Shirley Kaiser (of Brainstorms and Raves fame) did I fully realize the potential of XFN. Shirley describes XFN as “a simple way to represent human relationships within hyperlinks”.

The process of implementing this is delightfully simple, for example;

Let’s say you’re linking to your girlfriend’s web site. The link to her web site is http://www.bayareachicawica and her relationship to you would fall under the relationship category of ‘romantic’. A quick look at the XFN cheat sheet and you notice four sub-categories; muse, crush, date and sweetheart.

At this point you would need to decide which subcategory she would fall under. For this example we’ll go ahead and use ’sweetheart’ which according to the XFN description is someone with whom you are intimate and somewhat committed to.

A link to her web site would normally look like this:


<a href="http://www.bayareachicawica.com" alt="Mary's site">My
girlfriend</a>


To XFN’ize the link we simply add a relation tag (rel) like so:


<a href="http://www.bayareachicawica.com" alt="Mary's site" rel="sweetheart">My
girlfriend</a>


Afterwards, submit your site to Rubhub, the relationship lookup engine. As described on the XFN web site “Rubhub will index your XFN relationships, add you to its global network of XFN Friendly sites, and let you see how people relate to you and how you relate to other people.”