André Luís wrote:
What I interpreted from Chris' words was that contact and me was the
only values _needed_ to achieve contact list portability. Not that the
rest should be dropped altogether.
There isn't really any other way to interpret what he wrote:
If you use Google’s new Social Graph API
<http://code.google.com/apis/socialgraph/> and actually go looking
for XFN data (for example, on Twitter or Flickr or others
<http://microformats.org/wiki/xfn-implementations>), you’ll find
that, by and large, the majority of XFN links on the web are using
either |rel-contact| or |rel-me|.
If you’re lucky, you might find some |rel-friend|s in there, but
after rel-me and rel-contact, the use of the other 16 terms falls
off considerably. Compound that fact with the minor semantic
distinction between “contacts” and “friends” on different sites
(sites like Dopplr dispense altogether with these terms, opting for
“fellow travelers”) and you quickly begin to wonder if the “semantic
richness” of XFN is really just “semantic deadweight”.
And, in terms of evangelism and potential adoption, this is
critical. If 16 of the 18 XFN terms are just cruft, how can we
maintain our credibility [?] ...
So, with that, I’m no longer going to both with advocating for the
complete adoption of XFN. Instead, I’m going to advocate for
supporting /Contact List Portability/ by implementing rel-me and
rel-contact (a “subset” of XFN).
The above, taken from his post --- though his blog software appears to
be having issues right now --- says that
1.) He positively asserts that if YOU look at Twitter, Flickr, and a
handful of other sites, you will see that they do use rel-me and
rel-contact.
2.) He negatively asserts that you might find others XFN rels in the
wild but probably not because they aren't used.
3.) Therefore, XFN sans rel-me and rel-contact is cruft and should be
dropped in favor of just rel-me and rel-contact.
Statement #1 is flawed because the corpus is not representative; it's a
look at sites that were already known to use those formats. My numbers
(taken from a current, large web corpus) indicate that #2 is false
across the web-at-large. Therefore, I find it hard to support his
conclusion. ~D
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