Question

In html 5, rel="author" is used to link to information about the author of the page. This can be a mailto: address, though it doesn’t have to be. It could simply link to a contact form or “about the author” page (I personally wouldn’t want to provide email for obvious reason).

Until now, I’ve been using the meta author attribute to do effectively the same thing—although the advantage of the new html 5 specification is that you can provide more than just a name, but also a link where further information about you is provided.

It seems, based on another answer on Stack Overflow, that Google, Yahoo, and MSN do not index the <meta> author tag [source]. It suspect they don’t currently index rel="author" either.

Would it make sense to provide both? Or is it pointless to worry about this at present?

Answer 1

Behind the war between search engines, are kind of “proprietaries metas”, then I’ll go for both.
Search engine should not blame you to use both until you’re not trying to do some spam indexing.

Depending on what is the purpose of your content, there are specific meta used in different contexts.

Google Scholar Metadata

Let you use:

<meta name="citation_authors" content="Donald Jenkins">
<meta name="citation_keywords" content="html5 html meta-tags">

There is also Dublin Core Meta Data Initiative, which provides a complete set of metadata for authoring, etc.

Not a medata but still interesting to provide personnal informations, the hcard microformat, it uses plain and semantic html to provide vcard, in a format which can be parsed by other engine.

Example of hcard:

<div class="vcard">
 <a class="url fn n" href="http://borisguery.com/">
  <span class="given-name">Boris</span> 
  <span class="family-name">Guéry</span>
 </a>
</div>