What meta tag should I use to indicate the website (not content) author?

Question

The issue:

In HTML you can use author meta tag (or the DC creator) to indicate that someone is the author of the information (i.e. content). However, I want to be able to sign myself as a web application developer in meta tags.

Most people are (in my opinion) misusing the author meta tag for the web application developer signature. For example when you develop blogging application, the author should be the article writer, not the application developer. But the name of the application developer is still useful meta information.

I think that the commonly used set of meta tags is incomplete, because it does not offer a meta tag for this kind of information. Am I right, or did I miss something? What would you suggest?

---

Additional thoughts:

Meta tags in digital publishing are closely following meta model used in paper publishing and libraries. The set of Dublin Core elements might be good example for that. If we use this analogy, then publisher might be what I am looking for. Still, I feel that it is not. Publisher might be someone else than the web developer. Can you find better analogy with the paper world?

Answer 1

Guess it's the typesetter!

I use three things:

1. a humans.txt file
2. If the site gives permission, a link in the footer to my site "Web design by …"
3. A x-author: My Business Name header sent with the php.

The last one is a little pointless, but it's more there so a future developer who takes over might be able to have a clue who I am!

Answer 2

You can use pretty much any name attribute in a meta tag, just as you like. The tags will be ignored anyway, except perhaps when the document is processed by some site-specific indexing robot or something similar. It’s largely comparable to a comment.

You can check http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/the-meta-element.html#the-meta-element (and http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/MetaExtensions which is referred to by it) and then decide to use author or dcterms.contributor. Or maybe invent your own, like programmer.

Calling an application developer an author is quite OK. “Author” does not mean just a creator of a literary work.