SGML: NITF and HyTime

Subject: NITF and HyTime

Date: Thu, 24 Oct 1996 15:05:18 -0100

From: David Allen <ho73@dial.pipex.com>

Newsgroup: comp.text.sgml


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The International Press Telecommunications Council and the Newspaper
Association of America have just released the (production) version 2 of
the News Industry Text format (NITF) DTD. See http://www.iptc.org/iptc

This DTD is designed for news information distribution and has little
structural, but significant content mark-up. During development we have
attempted to include the HyTime ILINK capablity as this is important to
news providers who cannot afford to delay the news in order to enter
links.

As Panorama Pro is the only browser I know that can display and resolve
at least some HyTime link functions this was used for testing the DTD.
Although this browser proved capable of reading and partially
interpreting NITF SGML document instances that only contain linking
information in a similar form to that produced by Panorama it has a mind
of its own. The browser promptly rewrites such files into its own web
format.  The crunch appears to be the statement in the HyTime standard
that ILINK implementation is vendor specific.

Can anyone help by commenting on our method of including the HyTime
links in the DTD and how we might provide full testing of this
functionality?

-- 
David Allen
MD IPTC
Serving the news movers
ho73@dial.pipex.com
visit www.iptc.org/iptc

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