This EDRLab Working group is open to EDRLab members and a few Invited Experts.
This work aims at creating a descriptive language representing next-gen BD / Comics / Manga, to be used as an "extension" or "module" (still to be defined) of the upcoming Web Publications / EPUB 4 standard.
See also: a post on the EDRLab website for the start of the WG.
Note: the introduction to CBML shows shared motivations, although we are targeting new reading experiences, where CBML mostly targets analysis and study of existing works. The end result of our work is an authoring format, directly usable as an interchange format between ebook publishers and reading systems.
EDRLab advocates the use of a JSON manifest in Web Publications / EPUB 4; the different behaviors defined in the present work will therefore also be specified with a JSON serialization.
More precisely, EDRLab adocates the use of JSON-LD, a JSON representation of linked data, compatible with RDF. The WG will work on a JSON-LD expression of the language in a future step.
More details about the technical decisions taken during the course of the project are found in the section named Technical decisions.
A BD, comics or manga contains a sequence of pages, often grouped in chapters. A traditional page contains a panel group, and panels contain speech balloons and captions. The boundaries between panels/balloons/captions can be ambiguous and they may overlap (e.g. a character in a panel with its arm in the adjacent panel; or a balloon going out of its source panel). Publications can be grouped in series and may belong to ebook collections.
We'll use therefore the following terms for publications:
Plus these terms for sets of publications:
Note: bib.schema.org defines Chapter rather than "section".
In a "page navigation" reading mode, a user can move from page to page using a key, tap or swipe gesture. In a "region based navigation" reading mode, one can move from region to region using a key, tap or swipe gesture.
Let's take Phallaina, or a visual narrative based on a set of interactive scenes: the notion of page is not so easy to define then. We'll assimilate the chapter or scene to a "page".
Extract from the CBML intro: "The page is indeed one of the primary structural and compositional units of comics. In TEI the page is viewed as a "milestone," an empty marker within the flow of the text. In comics books (and similar documents), the page is not an arbitrary milestone, but a compositional feature — a composed container for "panels" and text."
The work is split in different sections :
IDPF Workshop on Sequential Art (Comics, Manga, Bandes dessinées, and new form), 2014, Paris, France
CBML, the Comic Book Markup Language, and XML dialect based on TEI. Essentially add <cbml:panel>, <cbml:balloon> and <cbml:caption>.
Schema.org VisualArtwork, A work of art that is primarily visual in character.