XFN 1.1 Released
The gang at GMPG (which includes me) has published the XFN 1.1 profile. This is the profile we presented at Hypertext 2004, where we got a positive response to both the overall concept and the new values. They are contact, kin, and me. All three are the result of feedback we received after XFN 1.0 was released. Of the three, I find contact the most interesting, mostly because I would never have thought of it. To me, it seems like a value that is more about professional status than personal relationship, but a lot of people saw things otherwise. So in it went.
For those who aren’t familiar with the term kin, it refers to any member of your family, either a blood relative or someone closely related through marriage. As an example, all of my aunts and uncles are kin, even though half of them aren’t blood relations, having married into the family. It was the most compact ungendered term we could find besides “family”, which didn’t feel right.
As for me, that was a value we debated for inclusion in 1.0 almost literally up to the hour we released it. In the end, we cut it because we were resolved to include only those values we felt sure would be useful, thus keeping things as simple and lightweight as possible. We figured that if people wanted the value, they’d tell us—and they did. Tantek and I batted around some thoughts concerning uses of me while we were at the conference and I think we may be on to some interesting ideas. Hopefully they’ll hold up after further discussion.
If you have a comment on XFN 1.1 or an idea for a value we could add to a future version of XFN, let us know.
