rel-author

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Revision as of 23:45, 28 August 2014 by Tantek (talk | contribs) (move Google to past, add search engine article about no more google authorship, add indiewebcamp implementation and authorship algorithm citation)
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<entry-title>rel author</entry-title> Tantek Çelik (Editor)


rel-author 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 microformat standards suitable for embedding data in HTML/HTML5, and Atom/RSS/XHTML or other XML.

Summary

rel="author" 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:

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

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

Implementations

This section is informative.

Plenty of implementations in the IndieWebCamp community, in particular:

articles

This section is informative.

Articles and blog posts about rel=author:

past implementations

This section is informative.

Past implementations.

Google

An interesting rel="author" implementation set of examples is brought up by Google in a video posted on Youtube:

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:

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

This technique is explained in the following video:

query param issues

  • 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 in their app, and this will just break things. Singpolyma 17:56, 12 August 2011 (UTC)
  • ...

see also