Few weeks ago I watched Tantek Çelik give a demonstration of the Plaxo open social graph which is basically a rel="me" spider. It reminded me how powerful practical demonstrations are at communicating key concepts.

So I have built lab.backnetwork with the idea of constructing a number of service based interfaces which are practical demonstrations of key concepts that are currently under discussion.

I am really interested in focusing on the portable social network area, so I have start with a very simple example of XFN pagination using rel="next". I am hoping to fellow this with a second interface which can parse the XFN/hcard pattern.

XFN pagination interface
Given any Url it will parse XFN relationship links within a page and then fellow any additional links that have the rel="next" attribute. I have limited system to only spider 20 pages at a time. I have provided two set of test pages with different pagination patterns.

http://lab.backnetwork.com/xfnpagination/

Simple pagination design pattern where the user is viewing pages 2 of a set.

[sourcecode language="html" wraplines="true"]
Pages: <a href="page1.htm" rel="prev">1</a>
2 <a href="page3.htm" rel="next">3</a>
[/sourcecode]

The interface will work with any site, but at the moment there are very few if any site which use rel="next".