47

While doing the HTML for my new template, I stumbled across a new meta tag

<link rel="profile" href="http://gmpg.org/xfn/11" />

What's this for? I found it linking to this page, and through Google I found this Microformat but I didn't get it.

albert
  • 7,915
  • 3
  • 42
  • 62
Omar Abid
  • 14,746
  • 24
  • 72
  • 105

2 Answers2

34

In HTML 4.01, there is the profile attribute for the head element:

This attribute specifies the location of one or more meta data profiles, separated by white space. For future extensions, user agents should consider the value to be a list even though this specification only considers the first URI to be significant.

It is used to link to meta data profiles.

In HTML5, the profile attribute was dropped.

As an alternative to it, the rel value profile could be used (with several advantages over the profile attribute). RFC 6906 describes the "profile Link Relation Type".

An example format for such meta data profiles (whether for the profile attribute or the rel value) is XMDP: XHTML Meta Data Profiles. It is defined at http://gmpg.org/xmdp/:

a simple XHTML-based format for defining HTML meta data profiles easy to read and write by both humans and machines

In your example, the profile for XFN is used, the Xhtml Friends Network (archive.org link):

a simple way to represent human relationships using hyperlinks

DaveLak
  • 758
  • 8
  • 16
unor
  • 82,883
  • 20
  • 183
  • 315
  • 10
    Can it be safely deleted? What is its purpose? None of this really tells me its purpose. – felwithe Mar 10 '19 at 17:37
  • @felwithe: The whole answer is about its purpose: it’s used to specify metadata profiles. Whether or not you can safely delete it from a document cannot be answered without knowing why it’s there / without knowing if there’s a consumer making use of it. – unor Mar 10 '19 at 19:40
  • 10
    It literally doesn't even say what a metadata profile is. – felwithe Mar 14 '19 at 13:32
  • 1
    I know this is old but it may still be useful to anyone with a similar question as I do now. It can be frustrating when you come across this jargon-like links especially in WordPress and you have no idea what it is. Check this article https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/173117/why-is-there-a-link-tag-with-rel-profile-pointing-to-gmpg-org I believe it explains better. – adeguk Loggcity Jul 16 '20 at 09:55
0

It's related to XHTML Friends Network (relation between links)

But don't waste your time on it.

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

Source: https://stackoverflow.com/a/1417789/4718434

yaya
  • 4,522
  • 1
  • 19
  • 24