HyTime is a markup language

Markup language

A markup language is a modern system for annotating a text in a way that is syntactically distinguishable from that text. The idea and terminology evolved from the "marking up" of manuscripts, i.e. the revision instructions by editors, traditionally written with a blue pencil on authors' manuscripts...

 that is an "application" of SGML. HyTime defines a set of hypertext

Hypertext

Hypertext is text displayed on a computer or other electronic device with references to other text that the reader can immediately access, usually by a mouse click or keypress sequence. Apart from running text, hypertext may contain tables, images and other presentational devices. Hypertext is the...

-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

International Organization for Standardization

The International Organization for Standardization , widely known as ISO, is an international standard-setting body composed of representatives from various national standards organizations. Founded on February 23, 1947, the organization promulgates worldwide proprietary, industrial and commercial...

 and IEC

International Electrotechnical Commission

The International Electrotechnical Commission is a non-profit, non-governmental international standards organization that prepares and publishes International Standards for all electrical, electronic and related technologies – collectively known as "electrotechnology"...

. 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

HTML

HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....

 and XML

XML

Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....

:

• HTML is an application of SGML for hypertext
  Hypertext
  Hypertext is text displayed on a computer or other electronic device with references to other text that the reader can immediately access, usually by a mouse click or keypress sequence. Apart from running text, hypertext may contain tables, images and other presentational devices. Hypertext is the...
  
   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
  Data modeling in software engineering is the process of creating a data model for an information system by applying formal data modeling techniques.- Overview :...
  
   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
  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:...
  
   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, 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

International Organization for Standardization

The International Organization for Standardization , widely known as ISO, is an international standard-setting body composed of representatives from various national standards organizations. Founded on February 23, 1947, the organization promulgates worldwide proprietary, industrial and commercial...

. It was developed by ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34

ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34

ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34 titled as Document description and processing languages is a subcommittee of the ISO/IEC JTC1 joint technical committee, which is a collaborative effort of both the International Organization for Standardization and the International Electrotechnical Commission.-Scope and Terms...

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

Further reading

• Steven DeRose
  Steven DeRose
  Steven J DeRose is a computer scientist with a significant history of contributions to Computational Linguistics and to key standards related to document processing, mostly around ISO's Standard Generalized Markup Language and W3C's Extensible Markup Language .His contributions include the...
  
   and David Durand
  David Durand
  David Durand was an Huguenot French and English minister and historian. He was born in Languedoc and fled France to the Netherlands before heading to Spain with a group of refugees, being captured at the Battle of Almanza in 1707 and being sent to France and then escaping to the Netherlands again...
  
  , "Making Hypermedia Work: A User's Guide to HyTime," Kluwer Academic Publishers 1994 (ISBN 0-7923-9432-1).

External links

• ISO/IEC 10744:1992 - Information technology -- Hypermedia/Time-based Structuring Language (HyTime)
• Robin Cover's HyTime resource list
• ISO/IEC 10744 Amendment 1 - an amendment to ISO/IEC 10744:1997 Annex A.3
• Standards: HyTime: A standard for structured hypermedia interchange by Charles Goldfarb, from IEEE Computer magazine, vol. 24, iss. 8 (Aug. 1991), pp. 81–84
• A Brief History of the Development of SMDL and HyTime