Interactive multimedia presentations are an essential issue in many advanced multimedia application tools. Before presenting multimedia data, media items, interaction types and synchronization constraints have to be specified in a multimedia document. This paper identifies and classifies the temporal interaction types in multimedia systems, and shows their impact on the specification process and the supporting system. Then, we describe how to specify the interaction types by using the standardized multimedia document language HyTime. The HyTime mechanisms are demonstrated by examples followed by a discussion of the advantages and limits of each technique.