January 11th, 2004 by Jemaleddin Cole

I like the work that Tantek, Pho­tomatt, and Eric have done on XFN, I really do. They have a good con­cept, but they haven’t taken it to its log­i­cal con­clu­sion. That’s what I’m here for.

For those that don’t know, XFN is a way of describ­ing your rela­tion­ship to the people you link to. I’ve liked the idea so much that I’ve had my blog XFN Friendly ever since the pro­file came out a few weeks ago. An entry for my wife looks like this:

<a href=”http://www.freshcaffeine.com” rel=”friend met co-​resident spouse muse sweetheart”>Caffeine</a>

A glance at the rel tag can tell any human reader or web crawl­ing soft­ware that we have a pretty close rela­tion­ship, which is good. I don’t know if the web will ever be smart enough that you could go to ask.com and say, “Who is Jemal Cole’s wife?” But you can see that it’s get­ting closer.

So what if I wanted to link to some­body I hate? What rel tags do I put in to iden­tify some­body as my polit­i­cal foe? Where’s the sworn enemy attribute? Where’s con­temptible lackey?

I pro­pose that we rename the pro­file to XFFN: XHTML Friend or Foe Net­work. I also pro­pose the fol­low­ing addi­tions to the spec:

friendship (pick at most one)

enemy

Some­one who you have decided is against you, per­son­ally or pro­fes­sion­ally. This person may be acting alone or in col­lu­sion with a ring of co-​conspirators. Pos­si­bly symmetric.

sworn-​enemy

Some­one you are an enemy to. A person you have ded­i­cated your life to erad­i­cat­ing. Most likely the ring­leader of a group of people out to get you. Prob­a­bly symmetric.

physical

fought

Some­one who you have actu­ally fought in person. Symmetric.

professional (pick at most one)

PHB

Pointy Haired Boss. From the Dil­bert comic strip, a clue­less boss that works against you. Inverse is lackey.

lackey

A mis­er­able snivel­ing ser­vant unwor­thy to scrape our your toe-​jam. Inverse is PHB.

family

ex-​spouse

Some­one you used to be mar­ried to until you real­ized how they were crush­ing your spirit. Sym­met­ric. Not transitive.

romantic

stal­kee

Some­one you stalk. Some­one who will learn to love you. Some­one that just needs to real­ize how per­fect the two of you would be together and if they can’t come to that con­clu­sion on their own, maybe you’re going to have to get a little rough with them. Inverse is stalker.

stalker

Some­one who stalks you. Prob­a­bly a schmuck. Pos­si­bly an ex-​spouse. Implies sworn-​enemy. Inverse is stalkee.

You can of course take this all much fur­ther. There ought to be tags for ex-​girlfriend and “jerk-that-stole-the-love-of-your-life” but we’ll leave that up for dis­cus­sion. Thoughts?

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