So I've been poking at XFN a bit for the past few days and from a high-level really get it. The idea is people had blogrolls and XFN provides a way to give context to them. I could then easily say that brad is a friend, I've met him in real life, and he is a colleague.

With MicroID, I also get it. Hash an email address and URL and stick it in the head section of pages to show equivalence. Much like XFN's "rel='me'". One difference with MicroID though is that you choose an email address and URL to use, versus XFN you see equivalence not by picking one but by linking them all together. MicroID also talks about how if you don't come across the MicroID in the head section of the page, that there must be trust in the 3rd party website as to if you believe whatever they are linking to is the person.

So this is where XFN breaks down for me. If the links can be anywhere on the page, then what is stopping me from posting a comment in brad's journal with the following:

Have you seen <a href='http://www.doxory.com'>Doxory</a> from <span class='ljuser' lj:user='obra' style='white-space: nowrap;'><a href='http://obra.livejournal.com/profile' rel='me'><img src='http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif' alt='[info]' width='17' height='17' style='vertical-align: bottom; border: 0;' /></a><a href='http://obra.livejournal.com/'><b>obra</b></a></span> yet?

Thus to an XFN parser, on that entry page, it would now look like http://brad.livejournal.com/12124124.html is saying http://obra.livejournal.com/ is the same person.

Am I missing something here?

Cool blog post that talks about ways to contribute to FOSS projects doing things other than coding.

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