QA Review of VoiceXML 2.1 (23 March 2004 version)

Hello Voice Browser WG,

Reviewing the VoiceXML 2.1 Draft, dated March 23rd 2004 [1] - overall a
very clear and precision document, I have spotted a few points worth of
attention:
- the conformance section of the document [2] uses terms like 'may',
'must', 'recommended', etc, but without reference to RFC 2119 nor is
there any definition of how these should be interpreted; is that on
purpose?
- the conformance labels (VoiceXML document, VoiceXML processor) don't
make references to the version of VoiceXML; is that intended?
- related to this, it's not obvious from reading voicexml2.0 (nor
voicexml2.1) what a voicexml processor should do with a <vxml> document
with a version that it doesn't know; if it should throw an error, I
wonder how this relates to the claim that VoiceXML2.1 is backwards
compatible with VoiceXML2.0
- it's not clear which sections are normative and which are simply
informative
- the notion of XML well-formed document is bound to XML 1.0 in the
spec; is there any discussion on accepting also XML 1.1?
- the references to XML 1.0 are outdated (latest version is from
February 2004)
- this may be planned for an more advanced draft, but having a table
with all the elements and attributes defined by VoiceXML 2.1 would be
great (like in HTML 4.01 [3])
- the example in section 9.3 is not well-formed (missing ending '>' in
the root element) [this was found out by extracting the examples from
the spec using an XSLT [4]; when the schema/dtd are published, it would
be nice to re-use this trick to check that the examples and the formal
languages are in sync]


Some input on one of the specific issues that the document raises:
- data_sec: is there any reason why this is done in a processing
instruction? process instructions aren't very scalable, have an odd
place in the XML infoset, among other things... It looks to me like this
security mechanism would be better addressed in a different place
altogether - e.g. it would be more scalable to have a way to link to a
security policy, rather than (or in addition to?) embedding in the
document itself.

Hope this helps,

Dom

1. http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/WD-voicexml21-20040323/
2. http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/WD-voicexml21-20040323/#sec-conform
3. http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/index/elements.html
4. http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/WD-voicexml21-20040323/
-- 
Dominique Hazaël-Massieux - http://www.w3.org/People/Dom/
W3C/ERCIM
mailto:dom@w3.org