This is a misintepretation of the backcompat portion of the spec. Everything in the compat rules means “look for”. In this case, “author - including compat root vcard in the absence of h-card” means to look for an “author” class name, *including* looking for a “vcard” class name on the same element, only if there is no “h-card” class name on the same element. Thus yes, according to the spec, the code snippet: Tom Morris Inside an hentry as noted above must be treated like: Tom Morris And thus in the parsed JSON it becomes a simple "author": ["Tom Morris"] as noted as a “preferable result”. If you can suggest wording that would help clarify this in the spec, I would be happy to make an editorial change to make this more explicitly clear (as well as similar for h-event location).

This is a misintepretation of the backcompat portion of the spec.

Everything in the compat rules means “look for”.

In this case, “author - including compat root vcard in the absence of h-card” means to look for an “author” class name, *including* looking for a “vcard” class name on the same element, only if there is no “h-card” class name on the same element.

Thus yes, according to the spec, the code snippet:

Tom Morris

Inside an hentry as noted above must be treated like:

Tom Morris

And thus in the parsed JSON it becomes a simple "author": ["Tom Morris"] as noted as a “preferable result”.

If you can suggest wording that would help clarify this in the spec, I would be happy to make an editorial change to make this more explicitly clear (as well as similar for h-event location).