XML News from Saturday, February 7, 2004

I warned the W3C that XML 1.1 was going to be a disaster. I warned them that it was going to cause massive problems for numerous people. I warned them that clueless users were going to start typing version="1.1" for no good reason, and thereby making their documents uninteroperable with most of the installed base of XML software. But they went ahead and released it anyway, and now my prophecies have come to pass. I must admit I didn't think it would happen quite this quickly, but I do know what Cassandra felt like. :-(


The W3C Voice Browser Working Group has posted the Proposed Recommendation of VoiceXML 2.0. "VoiceXML is designed for creating audio dialogs that feature synthesized speech, digitized audio, recognition of spoken and DTMF key input, recording of spoken input, telephony, and mixed initiative conversations. Its major goal is to bring the advantages of web-based development and content delivery to interactive voice response applications." Changes since VoiceXML 1.0 include new log and metadata elements, the deprecation of dtmf, emp, div, pros, and sayas elements, and better integration with the Speech Synthesis Markup Language and other generic XML applications.