Michael Eakes

As I re-posted Robert Scoble's geek dinner attendance list, I noticed that he included XFN notation in the links. When I re-posted the links, I made sure to edit all of the rel attributes to reflect my own relationships. But I could imagine that someone who uses a tool to copy links or simply is not yet aware of XFN might copy and paste them without realizing that s/he was specifying accidental semantic web relationships.

Those rel attributes convey one-way relationship information; from the owner of the containing page to the owner of the link. XFN tools must infer that the originator of the relationship is the owner of the page in which the link exists.

Since one half of the relationship is implied from the context of the containing document, there is a danger of misrepsenting relationship information by decontextualizing (re-posting) links that contain rel attributes. This problem would apply to any use of the XHTML rel attribute.

Maybe this won't happen much, but I wonder if we can come up with something to help keep the XFN network from being corrupted by such decontextualization.