ComicsML: A Simple Markup Language for Comics
by Jason McIntosh
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Pages: 1, 2, 3
Reasons to use ComicsML
There are several reasons why comics with a standard markup language applied to them could be cool.
Syndication
When I first started thinking about ComicsML, I had in mind the very successful XML syndication application known as RSS, Netscape's Rich Site Summary format. Thousands of web sites, including news sites, weblogs, and other sites whose content changes rapidly, publish a special version of their latest material as an XML page in compliance with the RSS document definition, allowing web applications to swoop in and collect the site's latest headlines without knowing anything else about the site -- in other words, it doesn't have to know where the site keeps its normal, human-readable headlines, or how to parse the HTML once it gets there, since the RSS page uses the same standard elements as every other RSS page in the world.
RSS gives web publishers an easy way to invite automated entities to grab pointers to their latest information. This little bit of extra work can pay off immensely for the site, as now people visiting web sites that collect and display a user-configurable collection of content from these many RSS 'channels' -- like my.netscape.com or (my favorite) Meerkat -- can effectively surf several sites simultaneously, paying one an actual visit when an item of interest pops up on its channel.
This is the heart of web syndication: sites agreeing to share a little bit of their content with other sites, which are free to do with it what they will, but it's presented so that each clump of content ties back into its origin. RSS has changed my surfing habits so that nearly every site I regularly visit now I hit by way of Meerkat, where once I would randomly bop around my bookmarks every so often, seeing if anything new and interesting was immediately obvious on various sites, a far less efficient or fun method.
I think a similar model might be able to work with online comics.
The reader's perspective
I don't read a lot of online comics, and I can tell you at least part of the reason: I am far, far too lazy to hunt them down. One could argue that this isn't too hard to overcome with a standard browser: just bookmark all these sites and, once a day, visit them all in order.
But many fine online comics come out less often or (like mine) on an entirely irregular basis. Nothing's stopping me from still hitting them every day if I wanted to, but I probably won't, because I'll feel like I'm wasting time.
The creator's perspective
There are many more comics available online than there are in your favorite newspaper, more even than there are of all the different comic strips published in all newspapers by every print comics syndicate. Getting a syndicate's attention is hard. Being a talented artist with an intelligent and sustainable idea for a regular comic isn't enough; one also needs a great deal of timing and raw, dumb luck to make one's pitch exactly when the syndicate is looking for a particular niche to fill. The number of new comics accepted by an average syndicate in a given year can usually be counted on one hand.
It may be a little easier for a talented creator to get into comic books, since their editors -- at least with smaller, less superhero-centric publishers -- tend to look more for creativity than pure mass-market appeal. But there's a reason for that: the audience for comic books is much, much smaller, often dwindling down into single-digit thousands where newspapers have a potential for millions.
So the Web provides a great opportunity for the comics creator to reach millions of people.
The Web perspective
If there were enough online comics using a standard markup
language, then aggregators could regularly snarf up information about
them, just like RSS aggregators do, and web applications would
summarize what's new in the world of (XML-clueful) comics without
anyone anywhere doing (much) extra work. The contents wouldn't have to
be the comics themselves, and many comics artists might prefer if
people still had to visit their site in order to see the full
thing. That's OK, and it's why I put the teaser element
in place. In any case, though, users still get informed that this
comic has been updated. Syndication is cool.
What if I wanted to use panel-describing elements so that I could add search engines to my comics website? What if I also wanted to syndicate my comics, but didn't want to let these syndication sites also grab all my content? I'd build two separate ComicsML documents. The first, without panel elements, would live at a URL I'd freely share with aggregators, while the other would reside in some private location, so that my own site-building tools could take advantage of them, without the whole Internet peeking in. This might be ideal if I relied on income from advertising, micropayments, or merchandise sales.
Some intermediate solutions already exist which partially address these same issues. Lots of people have written Perl programs that sneak off to their favorite comic web sites and download the most recent image from each, but this means playing the tired old game of accounting for every site's unique HTML style, which is a hassle to create and a burden to maintain. Other sites try to be something like web comic portals, but take extensive human input to maintain properly.
Searchable Archives
Just about every comic with a web presence has an archive collecting older strips. As these often stretch back to their first issue, archives of older strips can be massive. The normal way to read through them is to start at the beginning and step through the comics, one by one. Most comics archives have a ubiquitous suite of first, previous, next, last controls, and not much else. Let's say I wanted to find all Dilberts that mention downsizing. I'd be out of luck. Since all Dilberts are archived solely as images, no software can easily find what I want, and I'm not about to click through years of cartoons to find what I want.
Once again, some web-savvy comics have taken this matter into their own hands. User Friendly's site, for example, has its own search engine to match text queries with appropriate comic strips. This may work well for that one strip, but it sure doesn't scale across the Internet. If I wanted to grab a handful of geeky comics that dealt with some particular topic, perhaps in order to lighten the mood at some presentation, I could only easily find User Friendly comics. On the other hand, if all my favorite comics marked themselves up in a standard way through something like ComicsML, I could use an application to run my query across all their archives, returning with a result list likely comprising many different comics.
This would allow for searches with quite a bit of refinement, as the textual (and hence searchable) information about each strip would already exist in a hierarchy with implied levels of interest to a search engine. Strip titles and captions would probably have the most prominence, followed by dialogue, and then description.
One could also find more abstract information. Returning to the Dilbert example, were I particularly fond of Catbert, I might want to see all comics that have Catbert in them. That might be quite a few, so I could mix search styles to constrain the search, perhaps to all strips where Catbert says the word "outsourcing". Thanks to the descriptive elements that handle characters and dialogue, the software can return a list of relevant matches.
Accessibility
I am not blind and I don't know any blind people, so I don't know what resources may exist to help the visually impaired read comics (beyond what web searches tell me, which doesn't seem like a lot). I feel fairly certain, however, that a blind person can't pick up just any comic book or visit any web comic site they desire and give it a read. I think that sucks. Here is a part of your potential audience who might really enjoy your comics, but can never hope to do so unless they get friends to read and describe it aloud. OCR software might be able to read the text parts of the comic (if they're typed or written very neatly by the cartoonist) but can't describe the visuals that accompany them.
Proper markup could do a lot to help the blind enjoy comics. The W3C, the organization principally responsible for XML's creation and continuing development, has always held web accessibility for all as one of its primary goals. XML is already being used in several accessibility projects. Since the most obvious way to make comics readable to blind computer users involves keeping a text version of the comic as accessible as the comic itself, so that software can locate it and pipe it through a text-to-speech device, it follows that keeping this text in a predictably structured format would let this software quickly pull out the comics' content without any extra parsing.
Additionally, while it's an entirely different sort of accessibility, I'll note that descriptive markup would also let people with any level of sightedness read comics in a text browser like lynx. Perhaps the only Web browser I have to hand at a certain moment is the LCD screen on my cell phone, for example, but I'm stuck in a traffic-bound taxi, and I really want to see what's new with my favorite comics.
Conclusion
In the short time since I first shared a draft of this document with friends and coworkers, I've seen glimmers of wonderful ideas for directions to extend ComicsML that I doubt I would have ever conceived myself, covering everything from cross-referencing to story line management, and lots of folks seem game to try and catch the elusive problem of sanely describing layout. What's more, each of these people seemed to name a different reason why they liked the idea of a comics markup language. Given enough time and testing, I think ComicsML can live up to its name, becoming a method to let digital comics, no matter who produces them, hook into the vast information potential their presence on the Internet offers, while remaining simple enough for any aspiring comics creator to use.
Please contact me if you have feedback or leave comments in the forums at the bottom of this page.
References
- I've made a separate ComicsML resource page, an index to more information and support for this idea, as I develop or collect it.
- A draft of the ComicsML DTD available as well as a very chatty example document.
- The coworker who made the comment about Tupperware has written a very nice book called Learning XML, which I highly recommend. (Look for me in the Acknowledgments section, right above his list of favorite mustards.)
- Scott McCloud's website has all kinds of good stuff about digital comics (including many excellent examples from his own hand, one hilarious Web-collaborative effort, and lots of links to other groundbreaking work), but his big treatise on the issue is Reinventing Comics.
- Meaning of the "url" element
2001-04-25 03:54:40 Damian Cugley - Effort to define an Infinite Canvas for comics
2001-04-21 15:02:22 John Scott - finessing the hard part - comics = sequence = layout
2001-04-20 09:27:20 David vun Kannon - finessing the hard part - comics = sequence = layout
2001-04-23 19:10:48 Jason McIntosh - responding to demand
2001-04-19 11:55:24 pat donovan - another vocal-effects element
2001-04-19 11:44:30 Susanna King - another vocal-effects element
2005-04-12 16:59:56 The_Rumour - another vocal-effects element
2001-04-23 19:05:19 Jason McIntosh - collections / series
2001-04-19 02:00:03 Damien Dewitte - collections / series
2001-04-23 19:03:55 Jason McIntosh - interactivity
2001-04-19 00:18:23 tony a - Authoring it !!
2001-04-18 22:24:40 jaison joseph - Authoring it !!
2003-03-31 20:57:01 Dave Horlick - Can we see some rendered examples ?
2001-04-18 20:37:10 David Creelman - Can we see some rendered examples ?
2001-04-20 05:53:50 Dustin Vigil
