2

For starters, I understand what is the use of XFN for blogs. I see it being used in every WordPress theme. It makes sense.

But, is it still in use? http://gmpg.org/xfn/11 is showing no documentation. This page is empty. I had to access this page from archive.org.

Why is gmpg.org no longer maintaining this XFN page? Is it moved to somewhere else?

unor
  • 92,415
  • 26
  • 211
  • 360
Naresh Devineni
  • 111
  • 6
  • I am totally ok with negative marks for this question, but please do comment why you are not impressed with this question. I will try to get something out of it :) – Naresh Devineni Jun 20 '18 at 12:25
  • (Not my downvote) The issue I see is that you are asking if it has "benefits for search engines" -- asking for such SEO advice is off-topic on Stack Overflow (might be on-topic on [webmasters.se]). I’ll edit your question to make it on-topic. If you still need to know about the SEO aspect, you could ask a specific question on Webmasters. – unor Jun 20 '18 at 14:29
  • I appreciate the edit :) – Naresh Devineni Jun 20 '18 at 15:39

1 Answers1

1

The XFN link types are listed in the Microformats wiki: existing rel values

This wiki page is the canonical source of link types allowed in W3C’s HTML5 (and later). However, the current REC (HTML 5.2) links to a specific section on that page, while the XFN link types are listed in another section. It’s not clear if only the link types in this linked section are valid in HTML.

I have no insight whether gmpg.org is still maintained. But the status of this site shouldn’t affect the use of XFN. The definitions are known, the link types are listed in the relevant Microformats page, and countless sites use it.

unor
  • 92,415
  • 26
  • 211
  • 360
  • Is there a way that I could see XFN benefits in action?? – Naresh Devineni Jun 20 '18 at 15:48
  • @NareshDevineni: Not much to see, I guess? Every interested consumer could make use of these relations; if some do, there is not necessarily something to show, though. -- One example use case for the `me` link type: the Indie Web folks [make use of it](https://indieweb.org/rel-me) for authentication. – unor Jun 20 '18 at 16:09
  • Ah! That is what I am looking for......thank you for such example ... would you please edit your answer to reflect above..that would be really great :) – Naresh Devineni Jun 20 '18 at 16:58
  • I’d prefer not to include examples in the answer, as this might attract answers with lists of more consumers/use cases (and such lists are off-toic here), and would require updating the answer when certain cases are no longer in use. -- While one example certainly wouldn’t hurt, I have no idea if the `rel`-`me` auth still is (or ever was) popular. – unor Jun 20 '18 at 17:20