Which HTML5 tag should I use to mark up an author’s name?

Question

For example of a blog-post or article.

header

09-02-2011
John
My articl         


        

Answer 1

Google support for rel="author" is deprecated:

"Authorship markup is no longer supported in web search."

Use a Description List (Definition List in HTML 4.01) element.

From the HTML5 spec:

The dl element represents an association list consisting of zero or more name-value groups (a description list). A name-value group consists of one or more names (dt elements) followed by one or more values (dd elements), ignoring any nodes other than dt and dd elements. Within a single dl element, there should not be more than one dt element for each name.

Name-value groups may be terms and definitions, metadata topics and values, questions and answers, or any other groups of name-value data.

Authorship and other article meta information fits perfectly into this key:value pair structure:

• who is the author
• date the article published
• site structure under which the article is organized (category/tag: string/arrays)
• etc.

An opinionated example:

  

    
Article Title
    
Subtitle
    

      
Author:
      
Remy Schrader
      
All posts by author:
      
Link
      
Contact:
      

    
  
  

    
  

As you can see when using the

element for article meta information, we are free to wrap

, and even tags in

and/or

tags according to the nature of the content and it's intended function.
The

,

and

tags are free to do their job -- semantically -- conveying information about the parent

; , and

are similarly free to do their job -- again, semantically -- conveying information regarding where to find related content, non-verbal visual presentation, and contact details for authoritative parties, respectively.