At 07:41 +0000 20.12.2006, Ciaran McNulty wrote:
On 12/20/06, Chris Messina <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
You could also use the absense of certain XFN values as a stopgap...
At least you know that the folks without sweatheart or spouse haven't
removed themselves from the pool!
Notwithstanding the claim that "It is a truth universally
acknowledged that a young man in possession of a fortune must be in
want of a wife"[1], there are folks who don't have a sweetheart or a
spouse who aren't looking to hook up.
"I can't understand it, Mother Superior. Since I added the
XFN information to the convent's website, we've all been
bombarded with email."
There are all kinds of inferences that it's dangerous to draw from an
incomplete description.
What if one's sweetheart doesn't have a URL (insane as that sounds in
this day and age)? :-)
My sweetheart has several URLs, but for a variety of reasons I don't
want to cite any of them with a 'sweetheart' relation (and she
wouldn't want me to either).
Which raises the whole question for me with XFN, which is a practical
one, rather than a technical one: do we really want the world to know
all that stuff about us? I keep finding myself torn between the
desire to implement XFN just because it's such a cool idea, and the
feeling that 'No, the world does not need a traversable graph of all
my relationships'. On the future day that I'm arrested for harboring
thoughts unfriendly to the Regime, do I want them to have a
machine-readable list of all my friends? Or do I want some future
scammer/spammer to be able to go to my friend and say "Angus gave me
your address and said we should get in touch." (A message that began
"Hey, _______, Angus says you have a small penis." could get me into
all kinds of trouble). One day marking up your relationships with XFN
might seem as naive as putting your email address on your site.
To use or not to use XFN is a decision that everyone has to make for
themselves. One thing that I think I might use more readily would be
an XFN for non-human entities. I could imagine tagging links to sites
that I've built with markers like "blog", "vanitysite", "business",
"project", "client", "employer" and so forth. Again, there are
potential pitfalls, but it's a little less intimate than XFN as it
stands now.
Angus
[1] "Pride and Prejudice", Jane Austen
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