XFN Relationship types

I'm seeing a lot of XFN that uses rel="contact".
But there's also quite 
a few cases where rel="some other relationship" is
being used along with 
other qualifiers.

Is there some standard here we should be encouraging like
rel="Contact 
Acquaintance" or do we expect developers to know that
an Acquaintance is 
also a Contact? And if it's the second is there some mapping
table on a 
wiki somewhere?

-- 
Julian Bond  E&MSN: julian_bond at voidstar.com  M: +44
(0)77 5907 2173
Webmaster:          http://www.ecademy.com/  
   T: +44 (0)192 0412 433
Personal WebLog:    http://www.voidstar.com/
    skype:julian.bond?chat
                            Tastes Like Milk
_______________________________________________
microformats-discuss mailing list
microformats-discussmicroformats.org
http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microforma
ts-discuss

Julian Bond wrote:
> I'm seeing a lot of XFN that uses
rel="contact". But there's also 
> quite a few cases where rel="some other
relationship" is being used 
> along with other qualifiers.
>
> Is there some standard here we should be encouraging
like rel="Contact 
> Acquaintance" or do we expect developers to know
that an Acquaintance 
> is also a Contact? And if it's the second is there some
mapping table 
> on a wiki somewhere?
A related thing confused me:

Is "X xfn:acquaintance Y" a claim that is
considered consistent with the 
weaker claim "X contact Y" ?

Some sites I have buddies listed and since that site isn't
so well 
informed about how well I know those people, they'll emit
only 'contact' 
links; others have more detail and understand that we have
met (and are 
acquaintances) or even that we're friends.

The 'friendship (pick at most one)' rule in http://gmpg.org/xfn/11 can

be read in two fundamentally different ways. One is that
these are 
mutually exclusive states of affairs: call it Reading (A),
"If I'm your 
friend, then I'm not a contact or acquaintance". This
reading takes the 
constraint to be a rule about the world. Another, reading
(B) is that 
"If I claim I'm your friend in some document, I
shouldn't also state 
that I'm a contact or acquaintance". This reading takes
the constraint 
to be a rule about document syntax / notation. These two
styles roughly 
correspond to the comfort zones of RDF vs XML schema
languages, btw. RDF 
schemas express generalisations about the world; XML
schemas

I've tended towards the latter reading; since it fits with
the webby 
model of scattered, partial information. Last.fm might know
that we're 
contacts; Flickr might know that we're friends. And missing
information 
isn't necessarily the same as being broken.

How often is something like 'rel="Contact
Acquaintance"' (ie. multiple 
from the friendship options together) seen in practice? Does
anyone have 
a good list of other common values seem alongside the
well-known XFN set?

cheers,

Dan

--
http://danbri.org/
_______________________________________________
microformats-discuss mailing list
microformats-discussmicroformats.org
http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microforma
ts-discuss

Julian Bond wrote:

> Is there some standard here we should be encouraging
like rel="Contact
> Acquaintance" or do we expect developers to know
that an Acquaintance is
> also a Contact? And if it's the second is there some
mapping table on a
> wiki somewhere?

The background <http://gmpg.org/xf
n/background> document makes it pretty 
clear (as does the profile document) that contact,
acquaintance and friend 
are mutually exclusive. 

They can be considered a scale. Choosing a value higher up
the scale (e.g. 
friend) both forbids the explicit use of one lower down the
scale (e.g. 
contact), but also implies its meaning. So it's not valid to
write, say:

	<a href="http://bob.example.net&q
uot; rel="friend contact">...</a>

but when faced with:

	<a href="http://bob.example.net&q
uot; rel="friend">...</a>

it is acceptable for a parser to conclude that Bob is one of
your contacts.

The "co-resident" and "neighbor" values
could also be construed in such a 
manner.

-- 
Toby A Inkster BSc (Hons) ARCS
[Geek of HTML/SQL/Perl/PHP/Python/Apache/Linux]
[OS: Linux 2.6.17.14-mm-desktop-9mdvsmp, up 15 days, 4:59.]

                   Tagliatelle with Fennel and Asparagus
   http://tobyinkster.co.uk/blog/2008/04/06/t
agliatelle-fennel-asparagus/

_______________________________________________
microformats-discuss mailing list
microformats-discussmicroformats.org
http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microforma
ts-discuss