what is this?

Question

I got this code from the wordpress

<head profile="http://gmpg.org/xfn/11">

What does this means?

what is the use of this code.? :-)

Possible duplicate of [Use of profile attribute in HTML head tag](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1585220/use-of-profile-attribute-in-html-head-tag) — zanetu, May 23 '16 at 02:07

score 14 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 13 '09 at 13:02

From http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/global.html#h-7.4.4.3

Meta data profiles

The profile attribute of the HEAD specifies the location of a meta data profile. The value of the profile attribute is a URI. User agents may use this URI in two ways: As a globally unique name. User agents may be able to recognize the name (without actually retrieving the profile) and perform some activity based on known conventions for that profile. For instance, search engines could provide an interface for searching through catalogs of HTML documents, where these documents all use the same profile for representing catalog entries. As a link. User agents may dereference the URI and perform some activity based on the actual definitions within the profile (e.g., authorize the usage of the profile within the current HTML document). This specification does not define formats for profiles.

can you explain why you would want to link this to "http://gmpg.org/xfn/11"? — Jens Timmerman, Jun 12 '23 at 16:06
@JensTimmerman I guess because that’s the data profile they wanted to use. Looking at it, it appears to be a way to label links on your page with the relationship you have to the owner of that page. — Paul Tomblin, Jun 13 '23 at 17:44
but why would you want to do that? Why do a lot of wordpress pages use that same data profile? It looks like a placeholder that is never replaced, or does it have some actuall value if everyone links to the xfn/11 data profile? — Jens Timmerman, Jun 14 '23 at 10:23

score 13 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 13 '09 at 13:48

13

It's useless enough to be dropped from the HTML5 draft. I'd suggest against using it.

answered Sep 13 '09 at 13:48

Ms2ger

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+1 I agree! It's definitely useless enough not to waste time on it. – Marco Demaio Apr 08 '11 at 08:48
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Haha :-) But actually I've noticed that it's not dropped; it's just moved elsewhere: ``. – atlaste Oct 19 '19 at 08:58

score 10 · Answer 3 · answered Sep 13 '09 at 13:03

10

Its like a meta link for the XHTML Friends Network. XFN is a way of describing, in a machine-readbale way, relationships between you and other people.

answered Sep 13 '09 at 13:03

Jonny Barnes

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relationships between you and other people ?? means, what is the use ? – coderex Sep 13 '09 at 13:12
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You can link to someones website/blog and markup the relation using the X/HTML rel attribute; e.g. Dave Essential XFN is a list of terms that can be put in the rel attribute – Jonny Barnes Sep 13 '09 at 20:24
Also do not forget to add reverse relation (rev="friend met") in the target document. It is like: you have a page A and there is a link: and in the page B you add: or so. Or, you can add rev in lieu of rev. – Arsenii Jan 05 '20 at 18:27

score 3 · Answer 4 · answered Sep 13 '09 at 13:01

3

It is a meta data profile.

As specified by http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/types.html#type-links, profiles should be specified when using values for the rel attribute that are not defined in the HTML specification.

See http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/global.html#h-7.4.4.3 and http://gmpg.org/xfn/11 for the details.

answered Sep 13 '09 at 13:01

Quentin

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does it make sense to set this attribute to 'href="https://gmpg.org/xfn/11"' ? – Jens Timmerman Jun 12 '23 at 16:04

score 0 · Answer 5 · answered Aug 02 '23 at 23:12

Here it is explained quite well : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XHTML_Friends_Network

Basically , an example would be if you wrote a blog post (thats why its on wordpresses site) You coudl put the rel ( relation ) the person you tagged in the blog has to you.

cant see the point personally but something to do with web crawling for importance of relationship. Maybe users can view the rel in their browser and see who the person linked in the blog is to the user... again though,who cares? i believe a good answer would answer this part of the question...

score -1 · Answer 6 · answered Jan 04 '10 at 01:34

Theoretically speaking, I believe this is a wonderful attribute to add to a link. By identifying this parameter in the link origin offers the possibility to add another metric in the attempts to verify the importance of a link by the search engines of today and the companies that utilize the data in the future. This attribute could help determine if a link to someone is not spam or spam-esque.

Unfortunately, there would be a "continual static" in the data from manipulation of the web masters to use the most impactful link relationship as results demonstrate instead of an actual.
I believe that no matter the hardship now to incorporate, this important attribute should be used and tracked regardless of the possible manipualtions.

Has anyone seen anything more on this attribute being utilized or incorporated? I'll keep reading. Thanks for the hard work.

what is this?

6 Answers6

Linked