How should a document with multiple authors be presented?

[benlk]

Many documents on the web are a product of joint authorship. How should they be presented?

The most-backwards-compatible way is to put the author names all in the author_name field, and then pick one author's URL for display:

{
  "version": "1.0",
  "provider_name": "largo.test",
  "provider_url": "https://largo.test",
  "author_name": "Alice Example and Bob Example",
  "author_url": "https://largo.test/author/alice-example/",
  "title": "This is a post by two authors",
  "type": "rich",

But that loses the link for Bob Example.

Could this spec be updated to support multiple authors, with a fallback for parsers that have not been updated?

{
  "version": "1.0",
  "provider_name": "largo.test",
  "provider_url": "https://largo.test",
  "authors": [
    {
      "author_name": "Alice Example",
      "author_url": "https://largo.test/author/alice-example/",
    },
    {
      "author_name": "Bob Example",
      "author_url": "https://largo.test/author/bob-example/",
    }
  ],
  "author_name": "Alice Example and Bob Example",
  "author_url": "https://largo.test/author/alice-example/",
  "title": "This is a post by two authors",
  "type": "rich",

[benlk]

Considerations for supporting multiple authors:

• backwards-compatiblity:
  • What recommendation should the specification make for choosing the URL that goes in author_url?
  • What recommendation should the specification make for presenting multiple authors in author_name?
• internationalization/localization: An array of authors would leave it up to useragents to determine the presentation order and conjunctions used when formatting the array for output