View source for rel-author

<entry-title>rel author</entry-title>
<span class="h-card">[[User:Tantek|Tantek Çelik]]</span> (Editor)
----
<dfn style="font-style:normal;font-weight:bold">rel-author</dfn> is for linking from an article or post (e.g. marked up with [[hAtom]]) to a page or site representing its author. rel-author is one of several open [[microformats|microformat]] standards suitable for embedding data in HTML/HTML5, and Atom/RSS/XHTML or other XML.
== Summary ==
'''<code>rel=&quot;author&quot;</code>''' is for relating an article or post to a page or site representing its author, typically to give them credit for their work (or portions of it, like books, articles, blog posts etc).

E.g. a page or a post written by a person "Erin Smith" could contain a link like:
<source lang=html4strict>
<a href="http://erin.example.com/" rel="author">Erin Smith</a>
</source>

The <code>rel="author"</code> attribute indicates that the destination of the link represents the author of the current page (or post).

== Examples in the wild ==
Add permalinks of pages using rel=author, with any particularly interesting details about their usage:

* [http://harpers.org/archive/2015/10/the-mother-of-all-questions/?single=1 Harpers.org]
* [http://variety.com/2015/tv/columns/donald-trump-saturday-night-live-host-nbc-controversy-protests-1201634443/ Variety.com]
* [https://www.masterseo.id/ Master SEO]
* [https://seo.web.id/ Jasa SEO]

The Harpers page is interesting because it uses multiple rel=author, but clearly intends to scope the authorship to the containing div class="article" element. This doesn't follow any spec.

The Variety page is interesting because it uses multiple rel=author, with the intent to scope the authorship to the containing article element (as described in the [http://www.w3.org/TR/html/links.html#link-type-author HTML spec])

== Implementations ==
This section is '''informative'''.

Plenty of implementations in the IndieWebCamp community, in particular:
* The [https://indiewebcamp.com/authorship authorship algorithm] uses [[rel-author]].

== articles ==
This section is '''informative'''.

Articles and blog posts about rel=author:
* 2013-08-20 http://moz.com/blog/google-plus-correlations
* 2014-08-28 http://searchengineland.com/goodbye-google-authorship-201975

== past implementations ==
This section is '''informative'''.

Past implementations.

=== Google ===
'''Dropped 2014-08-28[http://searchengineland.com/goodbye-google-authorship-201975]'''.

An interesting rel=&quot;author&quot; implementation set of examples is brought up by Google in a video posted on Youtube:
* [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgFb6Y-UJUI Authorship markup video] and the respective [http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=1229920 implementation procedure].

=== query parameter alternative ===
Google has proposed an alternate mechanism for specifying rel=author on sites/CMSs that don't permit authors to specify the rel attribute, using a query parameter added to the URL instead. e.g. the above example with query parameter:

<source lang=html4strict>
<a href="http://erin.example.com/?rel=author">Erin Smith</a>
</source>

This technique is explained in the following video:
* [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gG3Oh7Ues8A Authorship markup using URL parameters video] and the [http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=1408986 new implementation procedure] with the help of Google Profile (and hopefully, this type of implementation can be used on any other personal BIO page of respective author).

==== query param issues ====
<div class="discussion">
* While I understand the motivation here, this is not a good idea.  There will definitely be someone who has ?rel= as an actual query param meaning something [http://www.seomedan.com/ jasa seo] in their app, and this will just break things. [[User:Singpolyma|Singpolyma]] 17:56, 12 August 2011 (UTC)
* ...
</div>

== see also ==
* [[rel-author-issues]]
* [[hAtom]]
* [[hNews]]
* [[rel-faq]]
* [[rel-me]]
* [[existing-rel-values]]

[[Category:Draft Specifications]]