FOAF Autodiscovery

On the rss-dev list we've been looking at autodiscovery of rss and foaf using the link tag, specifically by extending the mime-type information. Another way to do it is to use a different 'rel' value. For RSS we currently use a rel value of 'alternate' since the RSS is presumed to be an alternate form of the same page. For FOAF, Kevin Burton suggested using a value of 'meta' which is a generic catch-all.

My suggestion is to use rel="foaf", e.g.:

<link rel="foaf" type="application/rdf+xml" title="FOAF" href="http://example.com/people/~you/foaf.rdf" />

To do this, the HTML spec recommends that you create a new HTML profile which basically provides an interpretation of the various conventions used in the HTML page.

I've put a profile up at http://blog.iandavis.com/200 3/02/profile. This is an extension of Aaron Swartz's RSS in HTML profile

To use it just change your HEAD tag in your HTML page so that it looks like this:

<head profile="http://blog.iandavis.com/2003/02/profile" >

You can then add the following in the head of your page:

<link rel="foaf" type="application/rdf+xml" title="FOAF" href="http://example.com/people/~you/foaf.rdf" />

Permalink: http://blog.iandavis.com/2003/02/foaf-autodiscovery/

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