rel-author

Tantek Çelik (Editor)

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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).

Examples in the wild

Add permalinks of articles (no homepages) using rel=author, with any particularly interesting details about their usage:

• Harpers.org
• Variety.com

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 HTML spec)

(Any homepages added to these examples will be reverted, and the editing accounts banned.)

Implementations

This section is informative.

Plenty of implementations in the IndieWebCamp community, in particular:

• The 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[1].

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

• Authorship markup video and the respective 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:

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

This technique is explained in the following video:

• Authorship markup using URL parameters video and the 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

• 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

• rel-author-issues
• hAtom
• hNews
• rel-faq
• rel-me
• existing-rel-values