Evil Home Stereo

Timo Gnabs points to XFN, the XHTML Friends Network. The proposal defines a bunch of additional XHTML link types which can be used to state the human relationship between web pages.

It has the same intention as the FOAF Project but the approach is different: With FOAF you define something like a personal profile while XFN is used to indicate your personal relationship to the persons behind the links on your site. Sounds cool, especially in combination with CSS attribute selectors.

But how do you keep your link releations up to date? FOAF conveniently collects all information in one place but with XFN you scatter meta information across your whole site.

Imagine you link regularly to somebody you’re working with but you’ve never personally met. One day you visit him and he becomes a good friend. Now you’ve got to grep through all your pages and update the links. You could keep all your links in a database but that’s not feasible for many static private pages.

I love the idea of the Semantic Web (actually am I fascinated by all kinds of networks). But while we already have to cope with linkrot today, the Semantic Web will most probably suffer under information rot.