Standards

The field of hypermedia is evolving rapidly. One development of particular interest is the World Wide Wibe initiated by CERN (Switzerland). The World Wide Web allows the user to locate and retrieve documents world-wide accross the Internet. A collection of browsers is available to browse through these documents. The Mosaic browser for example, offers powerful hypermedia facilities. The documents are required to be written in HTML (HyperText Markup Language), a standard hypermedia markup language in the SGML tradition. Some browsers, as for example Mosaic, allow for other document types as well. Another development of interest is the MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Exchange) standard. MIME offers the opportunity to send electronic mail consisting of a variety of (multimedia) material. To inspect multimedia mail, the recipient must define an appropriate display tool for each kind of content. In effect, the MIME standard is now being used by the Mosaic server as an internal representation language. Currently, neither HTML nor MIME allow for the definition of synchronization constraints between components. A standard (in development) that provides features for synchronization is the HyTime markup language, which is another offspring of the SGML family.