A new project at work has me diving deep into Microformats and XFN. I was looking to provide a link back from the page I was working on to that page’s inspiration and naturally found rel="muse" to be appropriate. Something was bothering me about its XFN classification though. In the documentation, rel="muse" is listed under as being a romantic relationship. This didn’t seem right.

I talked to Kevin and Cindy about it and we all agreed that being one’s muse does not infer a romantic (in the sexual sense) relationship between two individuals. Wanting further validation, I sought out the maddeningly intelligent folks on the microformats-discuss list.

Turns out rel="muse"‘s classification as “romantic” is in the capital-R Romantic sense. There was a bit of discussion of classic Roman literature and The Muses and whatnot – most of it over this author’s head (I was never much of a literature person in school). Either way, there’s a FAQ page available now on the wiki to answer questions like these. My question is the first entry on the page. Woo!