HyTime (''Hypermedia/Time-based Structuring Language'') is a

markup language Markup language refers to a text-encoding system consisting of a set of symbols inserted in a text document to control its structure, formatting, or the relationship between its parts. Markup is often used to control the display of the document ...

that is an application of

SGML The Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML; ISO 8879:1986) is a standard for defining generalized markup languages for documents. ISO 8879 Annex A.1 states that generalized markup is "based on two postulates": * Declarative: Markup should des ...

. HyTime defines a set of

hypertext Hypertext is E-text, text displayed on a computer display or other electronic devices with references (hyperlinks) to other text that the reader can immediately access. Hypertext documents are interconnected by hyperlinks, which are typi ...

-oriented element types that, in effect, supplement SGML and allow SGML document authors to build hypertext and multimedia presentations in a standardized way. HyTime is an international standard published by the

ISO ISO is the most common abbreviation for the International Organization for Standardization. ISO or Iso may also refer to: Business and finance * Iso (supermarket), a chain of Danish supermarkets incorporated into the SuperBest chain in 2007 * Iso ...

and

IEC The International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC; in French: ''Commission électrotechnique internationale'') is an international standards organization that prepares and publishes international standards for all electrical, electronic and r ...

. The first edition was published in 1992, and the second edition was published in 1997.

Legacy

Some of the concepts formalized in HyTime were later incorporated into

HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScri ...

and

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. T ...

: * HTML is an application of SGML for

document presentations, that assigns specific semantics and processing expectations to a fixed set of element types. * XML defines a simplified subset of SGML that focuses on providing an open vocabulary of element types for

data modeling Data modeling in software engineering is the process of creating a data model for an information system by applying certain formal techniques. Overview Data modeling is a process used to define and analyze data requirements needed to suppo ...

and establishes precise expectations for how the marked-up data is read and subsequently fed to another software application for further processing, but does not assign semantics to the element types or establish expectations for how the data is processed. *

XLink XML Linking Language, or XLink, is an XML markup language and W3C specification that provides methods for creating internal and external links within XML documents, and associating metadata with those links. The XLink specification XLink 1.1 is a ...

was intended as a simplified version of HyTime for use in the XML world, but has not seen much adoption. * Work on applying HyTime to back-of-book indexes eventually led to the development of

Topic Maps A topic map is a standard for the representation and interchange of knowledge, with an emphasis on the findability of information. Topic maps were originally developed in the late 1990s as a way to represent back-of-the-book index structures s ...

, which eventually became far more successful in its own right than HyTime ever was.

Standard

The HyTime standard itself is ISO/IEC 10744, first published in 1992 and available from the

International Organization for Standardization The International Organization for Standardization (ISO ) is an international standard development organization composed of representatives from the national standards organizations of member countries. Membership requirements are given in Ar ...

. It was developed by

ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34 ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34, Document description and processing languages is a subcommittee of the ISO/IEC JTC 1 joint technical committee, which is a collaborative effort of both the International Organization for Standardization and the International El ...

(ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1, Subcommittee 34 - Document description and processing languages).

References

External links

ISO/IEC 10744:1992 - Information technology -- Hypermedia/Time-based Structuring Language (HyTime)

- an amendment to ISO/IEC 10744:1997 Annex A.3
Standards: HyTime: A standard for structured hypermedia interchange
by

Charles Goldfarb Charles F. Goldfarb is known as the father of Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) and grandfather of HTML and the World Wide Web. He co-invented the concept of markup languages. In 1969 Charles Goldfarb, leading a small team at IBM, de ...

, from IEEE ''Computer'' magazine, vol. 24, iss. 8 (Aug. 1991), pp. 81–84
A Brief History of the Development of SMDL and HyTime
Markup languages XML {{compu-lang-stub

Legacy

Standard

Further reading

References

External links