4.0480 Hypertext Standards (1/67)

Elaine Brennan & Allen Renear (EDITORS@BROWNVM.BITNET)
Wed, 12 Sep 90 23:54:55 EDT

Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 4, No. 0480. Wednesday, 12 Sep 1990.


(1) Date: Wed, 12 Sep 90 13:27:51 EDT (67 lines)
From: pdk@iris.brown.edu (Paul D. Kahn)
Subject: Hypertext standards

Date: Wed, 12 Sep 90 13:27:51 EDT
From: pdk@iris.brown.edu (Paul D. Kahn)
Subject: Hypertext standards


This is in response to Willard McCarthy's question about hypertext
standards:

This information comes from Victor Riley at IRIS (var@iris.brown.edu),
who has participated in some of the standards discussions at NIST
and has written the interchange format used by Intermedia, the hypermedia
system developed at Brown. Some of the participants in the Dexter Group,
such as Tim Oren of Apple Computer and Frank Halasz of Xerox PARC, may
be good sources of defacto standard information. And as the message
from Lou Burnard mentioned, there is something buried in the TEI documentation
on this subject as well.

==============

There are three groups currently working on standards in the Hypertext
arena. The first and foremost is the ANSI X3V1.8M committee. X3 is
the Information Processing Systems group of ANSI, while V1 is the Text
Processing: Office and Publishing Systems subgroup of X3. .8 is the
Languages for Text Processing and Interchange task group of X3V1, and
M is the Music Information Processing Standards study group. You ask
what music has to do with hypertext? Well when specifying a score or
opera one needs links to the various parts so that they can be played
simultaneously. This standard is called HyTime for Hypertext and Time-based
media. The standard is based on SGML and defines a DTD for linking
and anchoring in documents. To get a copy of the latest draft of
the standard one can contact:

Steven R. Newcomb
Center for Music Research
Florida State University
Tallahassee, FL 32306-2098
(904) 644-5786

The HyTime standard has started on the path to becoming an ISO standard.
Associated with this is the JTC1 TAG (Joint Technical Committee 1,
Information Technology Technical Advisory Group) group. They have a new
Multimedia Standardization study group forming to discuss standards. They
will be considering HyTime for this.

The second group is NIST (National Institute for Standards and Technology).
They are trying to come up with a hypermedia standard by holding workshops
to encourage the sharing of knowledge. The last workshop was in January
and presented lots of work (including my Intermedia Interchange Format).
Though NIST doesn't have a standard yet, they are leaning more towards
an ODA (Open Document Architecture) format. I can't find the proper
people to get the proceedings from, but you should be able to get the
proper information through NIST by contacting:

Judi Moline
National Computer Systems Laboratory
National Institute of Standards and Technology
Gaithersburg, MD 20899
(301) 975-3351

The third group is the Dexter group. They are a group of representatives
from various parts of the Hypermedia industry. While Dexter doesn't have
a Hypermedia standard, they do have a rather complete Hypermedia reference
model that can become the framework for a standard. Some members of the
Dexter group are in support of the HyTime standard, while others are still
undecided. The Dexter reference model is included in the NIST proceedings.