rel-author

 rel-author  is a microformat for linking a post to the URL representing its author.

Questions
Q: What is the meaning of the combination of  with   as a one-line authorship inside an h-entry?

Example: 

It's not clear to me why  is used in this instance, but not in other, more verbose, h-card instances. Is the implication of the combination, "The h-card is found at this URL" instead of "This is the h-card"? So far I have interpreted the  to mean "This is the h-card."

A:  is for legacy parsers that only support rel-author + rel-me for determining authorship, and don't support h-card yet (e.g. Google spiders). It is easy enough to add the rel-author to one-line h-cards.

In more verbose h-cards, using rel-author would add complexity and the cost of that complexity is likely worse than ignoring legacy parsers. It's a trade-off, but the recommendation to not use rel-author with more complex h-cards.

Answer summarized from IRC log