XHTML Friends Network

XHTML Friends Network (XFN) is an HTML microformat developed by Global Multimedia Protocols Group that provides a simple way to represent human relationships using links. XFN enables web authors to indicate relationships to the people in their blogrolls by adding one or more keywords as the rel attribute to their links. XFN was the first microformat.

Example

A friend of Jimmy Example could indicate that relationship by publishing a link on their site like this:

<a href="http://jimmy.example.com/" rel="friend">Jimmy Example</a>

Multiple values may be used, so if that friend has met Jimmy:

<a href="http://jimmy.example.com/" rel="friend met">Jimmy Example</a>

See also

• hCard
• FOAF
• DataPortability

External links

• XFN at the Global Multimedia Protocols Group
• XHTMLFriends.net - social network / geographic visualizer and search engine
• rubhub.com - a social search engine that crawls xfn links
• XFN creator Page to generate XFN hyperlinks
• Microformats 'wiki'.
• DataPortability- Advocate interoperable data portability to users, developers and vendors.
• Social Graph API - Google indexes pages embedded with XFN and provides API for aggregating the results.