May I use more than one <meta name="Author"> if many authors?

[Vince C.]

Hi,

I'd like to add author names in my pages head using meta elements. I haven't
seen any indication on whether a meta element - given its name attribute -
should be unique or not. I'd like to add as many <meta author="Author name">
elements as there are authors.

Is it valid? Or should I concatenate the names into one single "value"?

Thanks,
Vince C.

 

[brucie]

I'd like to add author names in my pages head using meta elements. I haven't
seen any indication on whether a meta element - given its name attribute -
should be unique or not. I'd like to add as many <meta author="Author name">
elements as there are authors.

the format is <meta name="author" content="author name or whatever">

you can make up a <meta> to be anything you like as long as it
conforms to the HTML specs (your example above doesn't). whether or
not that <meta> is supported or you can have more than one of the same
<meta> depends on the agent that uses that <meta>. it may be fine with
multiple <meta> being the same or may only like a single <meta> with
comma (or space) separated values or it may even want '*' to separate
the values.

if you know what format the agent wants that you're supporting use
that format otherwise just make something up.

The META element
http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/global.html#edef-META

 

[Richard]

Hi,

I'd like to add author names in my pages head using meta elements. I haven't
seen any indication on whether a meta element - given its name attribute -
should be unique or not. I'd like to add as many <meta author="Author name">
elements as there are authors.

Is it valid? Or should I concatenate the names into one single "value"?

Thanks,
Vince C.

How about <meta name="author" content="co-authored by john smith, jane doe,
jack n mehoff, baked beans, hot tamale, sea biscuit">

 

[Vince C.]

"brucie" <[email protected]> a écrit dans le message de
[...]

the format is <meta name="author" content="author name or whatever">

you can make up a <meta> to be anything you like as long as it
conforms to the HTML specs (your example above doesn't). whether or
not that <meta> is supported or you can have more than one of the same
<meta> depends on the agent that uses that <meta>. it may be fine with
multiple <meta> being the same or may only like a single <meta> with
comma (or space) separated values or it may even want '*' to separate
the values.

if you know what format the agent wants that you're supporting use
that format otherwise just make something up.

The META element
http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/global.html#edef-META

Thanks, Brucie. I had read the specs about META and also found I could use
profiles to store such kind of data. But it goes far beyond the scope of
what I want to do. When reading the specs I didn't find any requirement
about uniqueness of META/@name elements.

As for Authors, I think I'm going to concatenate things into one single
values, just like Richard pointed out. This way I'm sure everything goes
well in any circumstances, as you explained.

Regards,
Vince C.

 

[Vince C.]

[...]
How about <meta name="author" content="co-authored by john smith, jane doe,
jack n mehoff, baked beans, hot tamale, sea biscuit">

Let's go for it