Multiple authors in RSS or Atoms

Question

As far as I can see both Atom 1.0 and Rss 2.0 don't support multiple authors. What I want is just to double check with you guys whether there is a more or less standard way for including multiple authors except like so:

<author>Auhtor A., Author B.</author>

Answer 1

While you may be right about RSS, Atom 1.0 does specify a format for listing multiple authors. It looks something like this:
<author>
  <name>Jane Doe</name>
</author>
<author>
  <name>John Doe</name>
</author>

Whether or not all feed readers handle that is a different matter. Both Safari 5 and Google Reader, for instance, display only the last author in the list. This may be because the interaction model and UI for these readers were designed with RSS in mind and so they neglect to support the more advanced features of Atom.

Answer 2

Here is a good blog post about this:

http://www.xn--8ws00zhy3a.com/blog/2007/04/rss-email-addresses

Basically the answer is no, there is no standard format for multiple authors because there isn't even a standard format used for single authors. In fact, according to the RSS 2.0 standard, the <author> tag isn't for the name but for the email address of the author. They specify it in the format of [email protected] (John Doe) but there is not a set standard saying that is the way it must be. The basic consensus is that you cannot expect to parse this field. Since that is the case, you can list it any way you want and if someone is using the <author> tag, most likely they are just displaying it so you should be good to go.