Add item authors to spec

[croaky]

It is common for articles or podcasts to have multiple authors.
Examples include The New York Times and The New Yorker:

#6

Currently, the JSON feed spec allows one author object
on the top-level feed and one on each item:

author: {
  name: "Alice",
  url: "https://example.org/alice",
  avatar: "https://example.org/alice.png",
}

To provide an item with multiple authors,
the author names could be concatenated and URLs and avatars removed:

author: {
  name: "Alice and Bob",
}

Or, the author names could be concatenated
and combined URLs and avatars provided:

author: {
  name: "Alice and Bob",
  url: "https://example.org/alice-and-bob",
  avatar: "https://example.org/alice-and-bob.png",
}

Those use cases might work well when the author is a team:

author: {
  name: "Engineering Team",
  url: "https://example.org/team/engineering",
  avatar: "https://example.org/team/engineering.png",
}

This feels more awkward for use cases of blog posts / news articles
with multiple authors, or podcasts with multiple hosts where
the publisher wants to provide links for each author's individual
identity, such as to a listing of that author's other works.

In those cases, this structure feels nice to me:

authors: [
  {
    name: "Alice",
    url: "https://example.org/alice",
  },
  {
    name: "Bob",
    url: "https://example.org/bob",
  }
]

I can imagine a natural-looking feed reader experience of:

Article Title
by Alice and Bob
May 6, 2018

This change adds authors to items and attempts to make it clear
to implementers how to handle the various present/missing states
for author and authors. Although all use cases can be covered by the
authors array (single author items can be modeled as a one item array),
it does not deprecate author. I leave that decision to project maintainers.

Also, this change does not add authors to the top-level feed.
In my experience, even on publications with multiple authors per item,
the top-level feed author has appropriately been the publishing
company or organization.

[croaky]

Howdy, folks! Thoughts on this idea? Cheers.

[matwood]

Agreed, although I do think the Atom spec should have been followed here where all author items are lists. See feed https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4287#page-11 , and entry https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4287#page-11 .

Since author is already out in the wild, adding authors to each level as part of the spec would at least allow additional authors.

[croaky]

Cleaning up some old PRs. Okay to close this?

[manton]

Thanks @croaky! Yes, multiple authors are in the version 1.1 draft, so I'll close this.