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 may look 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 - and even then, perhaps only in the context of a personal blog linking to a personal twitter account.
If rel="me" has a limited use-case, what rel values should I be using for the author-contributor, 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:
<meta name="twitter:site" content="@websiteAccount"> // This Website
<meta name="twitter:creator" content="@authorAccount"> // Guest Author
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:
This list (from April 2009) contains descriptive summaries of 16 rel values:
