Biderectionally marking authorship/ownership of a page

Hello fair people,

I am a webdesigner/developer, trying to implement as much semantic markup as I can in my creations as to prepare accordingly for the future of the web (and also because it really excites me!). I was wondering if you could clarify what would the standard implementation for something I would like to markup.

Basically, the company I work for creates, publishes and maintains websites; some of these websites are part of a network managed directly by our company, while most of them are personal or other companies' websites (which could or could not be managed by our company).
It is common practice that the publisher company would put a "powered by/design by" credit link in the footer, and I was wondering how would the semantic metadata for such a thing would look like.

For example: let's say our company is making a website for a private person; should I put a <meta property="dc:creator" content="My company" />? Should the value of the content attribute be my company name or my company website? Should this specification be put in a <meta> tag inside the <head> tag, or rather would be better practice to just markup the credits in the footer? What would the property dc:creator refer to? If put in the head I assume that it would refer to anything inside the page; what about if put in the footer? What if some content is not created by the same creator and thus if a different creator is specified for different blocks of content? What would the most appropriate property for this usage: dc:creator or rather dc:publisher?

Example #2: let's say we do have a network of website which all refer to my company. Let's say that I want a bi-directional way to specify this ownership/relationship by this websites, how could that be achieved? For example I would have a list of the websites belonging to our network in the main website marked by <a> tags, and I want to specify that those website were specifically created/maintained/published/part of our company network, how should I do it? I'd assume the rel attribute would be the way to go, but, as far as I know, there's no specification to indicate this type of relationship. On the other hand, this relationship needs to be bi-directional to prevent abuse: I shouldn't obviously be able to declare my ownership of any link I have on my website, but there should be a way for me to verify my claims; by, for example, putting a rel="owner" on an <a> tag pointing to www.example.com and then put a <meta> tag on the head of said website to point back to the owner website, with some kind of owner property (whether dc:creator, dc:publisher or whatever may be more appropriate) so that the relationship is confirmed.

I was wondering, is there any way in the current specification to achieve this? Has this use been considered?
Other uses of this kind of markup could be marking up portfolios, for example, whereas my artistic creations would refer to an owner website and could be marked back from where they are published (whether by my, or by anyone wishing to use them and attribute them back to me).

I would be really interested if anyone could clarify/consider these points,
Best regards,

L.

Received on Thursday, 19 April 2012 20:41:26 UTC