What would Rupert do?

The usual marketing scheme for a successful series would be selling licensed products. So there is a loveless website, t-shirts, coffee mugs, DVDs, comics, eventually the stars produce a mediocre pop song. Fan pages will be sued, and the industry would bitch about weak sales because of evil pirates. However we’ve seen more successful ways, for example when the fantasy and science fiction novels that came along with Forgotten Realms or Shadowrun became more popular than the original role-playing games. All those products are set in the same fictional world, but the different media remain closed in themselves: for understanding the novels it is not necessary to know the game.

Then what is transmedia? Here is a quick introduction:

“Heroes provides the most innovative and immersive interactive TV experience on the web.”

Central in that universe is the TV series, accompanied by a wiki, web comics (in JPEG, flash or PDF format), several websites, mobile strategies, webisodes exclusively published on the web and many more – and they all form a narrative whole!

Transmedia Storytelling

When a character doesn’t appear in the series for a couple of episodes, their story goes on in the webcomics. The fictional characters have their own blogs, pages on MySpace and Facebook and ask their fans for help via SMS. Hanna even publishes clips from news channels in her blog. A fictional candidate for the US congress has his own website hacked by Hanna. Another discusses scientific theories in his book Activating Evolution (would be even more convincing if it was out-of-sale at Amazon). Fictional companies appear in the series, fans can apply for jobs on their websites thus getting insider information, or they can “hack” their surveillance cameras. Fan fiction and art is supported and can eventually become part of the series.

That idea isn’t exactly new, emotionally drawing in the fan base through “secret” information. As early as 1997, before the Star Wars prequels, George Lucas registered numerous domains temporarily forwarding to starwars.com. Then the information was spread around in Usenet and they observed which domains generated the most page views. Then a mysterious swamp environment was created at naboo.com. Apart from the usual swamp noise we can hear the calls of the Peko bird and the Nuna toad. Subtly playing with the methods of easter eggs those animals will move across the screen when you enter “peko” or “nuna” hearing their sounds. After about five minutes the swamp water begins to ripple. If you click on it you originally landed on a simple page with background information. Of course ten years later Heroes is editing and interweaving the content more elaborately – originally there were five people on their web team, now there are more than fifty.

Heroes has a world wide fan community – even in countries where the series isn’t officially aired on TV. It’s one of the most unauthorized downloaded torrents on the web. At least producer Tim Kring doesn’t mind that: Kring says “we fish where the fish are.” The whole multimedia strategy is designed for numerous sources of income. If fans get hooked via illegal downloads, the company will earn money elsewhere with them.

Most importantly today’s fans want to participate in “their” series, and this means more than offering contests and sueing them when they actually adopt content. Heroes is the pioneer massively involving their fan community into that complex alternate reality. The web provides the central communication platform, technically but most important creatively. In that depth this is an entirely new challenge for TV providers and Internet agencies!

Otherwise the draft’s abstract and introduction are vague and leave room for interpretation what this is exactly about. What I have understood is:

1. This module defines a new element with the name access.
2. The element can be used to define an access key for any other element.
3. Another usage could be as a skip link as there is a targetid and targetrole attribute.

For me it remained unclear whether this element belongs in the head like link elements, or in the body like anchors or label elements. Anyway, among other Common attributes it can have a title plus a few new attributes: key, targetid, targetrole, and activate.

• The key attribute is optional and defines an access key in a generic way. So far there was only the accesskey attribute for anchors and form elements, now any fancy Web 2.0 div element impersonating something else can receive focus by striking a key. Browser vendors are encouraged to emphasize the responsive character in a word, like underlining it. Also the working draft provides a description what user agents should do if there are conflicts with existing shortcut keys. So the team paid attention to the discussions about the reasonableness of the accesskey attribute.
• The targetid and targetrole attributes assign targets by id or role. There can be more than one of each, comma separated. I imagine that’s like tabbing through elements, but with a shortcut key.
• The last new access attribute is activate. I must admit I have no clear idea what “activate” could mean or what this attribute is good for. An element receives focus, so there should be a perceivable effect, some sort of feedback to the user. If an author does not want this, there are ways to suppress default renderings by CSS. If she doesn’t want the focus event to trigger something, there’s JavaScript to cancel it.

I thought of playing with the new element, but it’s too early for a test implementation. The working draft still lacks a XML Schema that could be used in namespaces. It would be possible to extend a DTD without much conflicts, alas the module doesn’t come in one box, but in two (again). So you would need to append both the qname module and the access module instead of simply adding the access module. I don’t understand the rationale for this separation, but I see it’s more painful for an author to implement it that way.

However, the access element provides a better and more generic functionality than existing alternatives, it fills the gap of missing access keys, and if I got it right it defines a standardized method for skip links, although this could be expressed clearer. Apart from the usual suspects there is Google’s accessibility specialist T. V. Raman on the team, and Richard Schwerdtfeger from the team that built more accessibility into Firefox, the Open Document Format, and IAccessible2 as an accessibility interface for screen readers. So my bet is we will see support for this element in our favorite browser as soon as this draft is more mature. Your turn, Microsoft.