A Microformat for Comics?
As the developer of a program to catalog comic-book collections, I keep track of a lot of comic-related sites around the net. There are a bunch of sites which catalog comics, and/or your personal collection. For example:
- The Grand Comics Database
- ComicBookDB.com
- The Long Box (sadly defunct, it looks like)
- ComicVine
- CBDB - The Comic Book Database
On top of these there are other, more focused sites, like ComicList.com, ComicsPriceGuide.com or ComicSpace.
Each of these in some form or another try to make information about comics available. They publish stuff like the cover price of issues, their casts and crew, the publishing company etc.
Wouldn't it be great if these sites could share data easily? Or if client-side applications could make use of their data in a uniform manner?
What if we all got together and put together a microformat for comics? That is, a way to express the information in a way that everyone understands. For example, a single issue might take this form:
<Issue ID="xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx"> <Title ID="xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx"> <Name>The Silver Surfer</Name> <Volume>3</Volume> <Publisher ID="xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx"> <Name>Marvel Comics</Name> </Publisher> </Title> <Number>1</Number> <Name>Free!</Name> <Cast /> <Crew /> </Issue>
... you get the idea? When a site needs to publish the details of an issue, they do so in a common, standardised XML format, and anyone can make use of that info.
If they want to pretty it up they can run it through an XSL stylesheet and turn it into HTML.
I don't know what the format should look like - the above is straight off the top of my head and has all sorts of things wrong with it. But I think it's worth a thought. What do you think? You guys who run the sites above - you reading this?
Comments
# Dave Snider
21/03/2007 5:53 AM
Hey!
Dave from comicvine.com here. Ethan and I (the other guy behind CV) were just talking about this yesterday. We were expressly looking for someone who developed an outside project so that we'd have a test case for it.
Now the thing is, I'm not totally sold on microformats. We want to open up the DB completely, and I think it might be better to create a XML tree for characters, issues, creators, volumes...etc.
Microformats seem ok for when you want to do small things, but I think they are still limiting in some ways. In any case, we definitely are sharing our content, but we'd really love someone who'd actually use our data to give us a testbed for providing things in a way that other devs would like.
Shoot me an email at dave . snider (at) gmail . com and maybe we can think up something cool.
# Chris
21/03/2007 6:26 AM
While it's cool that you're talking about a standard format for comics, you're not actually talking about a Microformat. Check out http://microformats.org for information on what they are and how to use them. They're even simpler than what you present -- Microformats allow you to embed simple CSS classes in your HTML which identify pieces of data as having some sort of special meaning. No need to write an XML generator, just mark up your existing HTML!
# mabster
21/03/2007 6:48 AM
Yeah, you're right, Chris. I did a bit of reading *after* making the post and discovered the distinction. But anyway, I think I got the point across.
We'll see what comes out of this.
# Chris
21/03/2007 8:38 AM
mab, check out this mailing list -- http://microformats.org/discuss/mail/microformats-new/. Maybe we can get something going?
# mabster
21/03/2007 9:01 AM
I'll give it a look, Chris.
A proper microformat for conveying a single issue of a comic would definitely be cool.
As I said to Dave via email, this post was really born out of my frustration that none of the major players are surfacing their data via web services or XML. If ComicVine starts doing that, I'll be rapt.