rel="sweetheart"

sweetheart

Someone with whom you are intimate and at least somewhat committed, typically exclusively. Symmetric. Not transitive.

from XFN 1.1 relationships meta data profile

I recently learned about microformats, which are a set of standards for including data within HTML elements. I like data, so I'm drawn to the concept of the "data-rich web page" that microformats make possible. My introduction to the idea was the IndieWeb's page on rel="me", a way to indicate that different webpages represent the same person. It works by turning a regular old <a href="link.html"> into <a href="link.html" rel="me">, and having the linked page reciprocate with its own rel="me" link back to the first, so that web parsers are able to verify that the two URLs belong to the same individual. The average person's web presence is rarely confined to a single domain, so it is useful to have a standardized way to connect various profiles.

The "rel" in rel="me" is short for relationship, and the microformats for describing relationships between people are defined by the XFN (XHTML Friends Network). You can indicate that someone you're linking to is a friend or family member, or describe the professional or geographic nature of your relationship. There are even options for romance. rel="sweetheart" (defined above) is the one I find the most charming, but there are three other values in the "romantic" relationship category:

muse

Someone who brings you inspiration. No inverse.

crush

Someone you have a crush on. No inverse.

date

Someone you are dating. Symmetric. Not transitive.

By adding XFN attributes to links, your site becomes a part of a decentralized social network. The data in these links can be understood by programs, which can then assemble that data into a giant map of human relationships across the personal web.

... Don't get me wrong. I like maps. But I can't help but ask "what is the point?" I understand that people are interested in people; it's fun to know who's friends with who, who's dating who, et cetera. But on a personal website, with full creative freedom, why should this information be relegated to semi-obscured data instead of being clear from the text within or around the link?

The data must be useful for something, right? The following excerpt comes from the official XFN site in a section described as "future potential" on the homepage and "delusions of grandeur" on the section itself:

"Commercial services like Amazon, which currently ask users to manually register all their friends in order to make "wish list" and other information sharing simpler, may find it easier simply to crawl XFN relationships on the open Internet. This would allow a user to enter the URL of their site, and let the service programmatically analyze XFN relationships to build a list of friends."

Is this all the data is good for? To help Amazon make sales?

Does it really matter if a parser is able to interpret my connections to people? The more I think about it, the more hostile to the idea I become.

rel="sweetheart" is a little treat for someone inspecting the source code, but is it worth it? When I link to my sweetheart, I don't want you to have to go digging for meaning! I want it to be obvious!!

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