rel-author

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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.

Google

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

extensions

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