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Rounin
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Is there a standard format for declaring a web page's informational relationship to multiple social media accounts?

##Question:

How should I approach <link>-ing a web document to three or more separate social media accounts, residing on one or more social media platforms (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter etc.)?


Exposition:

In the <head> of each article page on a given website, I would like to indicate a relationship between that article page and multiple social media accounts.

At the very least, wherever possible, I would like to <link> each article-based web page to social media accounts for:

  • the website (ie. this website, which is hosting all the articles)
  • the article publisher's brand (ie. the publication the guest author is from)
  • the article author (ie. the guest author)

It's worth noting that:

  • the website is always the same
  • the publisher-contributor sometimes changes
  • the author-contributor often changes

E.g. I understand that a conventional link to a Twitter account looks like this:

<link rel="me" href="https://twitter.com/example-twitter-account">

which is great, but given that (I've just learned) rel="me" is the XFN equivalent of rel="author", I conclude this is an appropriate form to use only when referring to the author-contributor.

So what should I use for the publisher-contributor and for the website itself?


##Ideas:

For the website's own Twitter account, could I (possibly?) use rel="alternate" or should I be using rel="[something else]"?

[Added]

N.B.: No, definitely not rel="alternate". According to MDN that's intended to indicate:

Alternate representations of the current document.

Source: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Attributes/rel

I initially believed that I wouldn't be able to use rel="author" or rel="publisher" to link to social media accounts, because I was already using those rel attributes to express relationships with specific web pages.

But now it occurs to me that I might use rel="publisher" more than once, like this:

<link rel="publisher" href="https://publisher-site.com/" />
<link rel="publisher" href="https://twitter.com/example-publisher-account" />

Added:

I note that I can use the following:

  • This Website: <meta name="twitter:site" content="@websiteAccount">
  • Guest Author: <meta name="twitter:creator" content="@authorAccount">

But that's still only two out of three. It's missing the Guest Author's own Publication.

Additionally, it's Twitter-specific and I am looking for something like:

<link rel="[relationship]" href="[social-media-url]" />

which I can apply to any social media platform (Facebook, LinkedIn etc.)


Further Notes:

The single most comprehensive list of rel attribute values I can find anywhere on the web is here:

This list (updated from 2005-2020) is also useful:

Rounin
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