[whatwg] adding microdata to basic links

Starting from a basic markup like this:
[[[
This book has been authored by <a href="http://smith.org/john">John
Smith</a>.
]]]

I would like to markup both the textContent of the link ("John Smith") and
the url from the href attribute.

In RDFa this is done by adding a couple of attributes to the a element. It
would read like this:
[[[
This book has been authored by <a property="name" rel="url" href="
http://smith.org/john">John Smith</a>.
]]]

Is there any way to do the same in microdata without adding a new HTML
element to the markup?

Steph.