RE: Modification of FPR 30 - Common UA <=> SS protocol

As I mentioned at the end of last call I'm a little suspicious of moving from things that describe user agent and speech server communication to things that describe web application and speech service communication (taking the UA out of the picture).  The reason this leaves me skeptical is we have a bunch of other requirements (security, latency, privacy, feature set) that imply the user agent is involved in this communication.  When we skip the user agent and go to a description that talks about web application communicating to the speech service I don't see how we maintain all of the other requirements.  I think fundamentally the web application makes requests of the user agent and the user agent also may make requests of a speech service (which may be local or remote, may be specified using html tags and attributes, or via URI references, or via browser plugins, or via javascript, or via new other W3C standardized APIs - the exact proposals of which of these work with most/all our requirements should follow only once we have all our requirements).

From: public-xg-htmlspeech-request@w3.org [mailto:public-xg-htmlspeech-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Young, Milan
Sent: Friday, December 10, 2010 12:43 PM
To: public-xg-htmlspeech@w3.org
Subject: Modification of FPR 30 - Common UA <=> SS protocol

The existing requirement reads: "The communication between the user agent and the speech server must require a mandatory-to-support lowest common denominator such as HTTP 1.1, TBD."

I would like to suggest the following modification:

Summary- Web applications must be allowed at least one form of communication with a particular speech service that is supported in all UAs.

Description - It may be difficult to agree on a common protocol that works for all requirements in the cross product of web applications, UAs, and SSs in the first version of the recommendation.  Since most "real world" applications require a tight coupling of the speech service and application, this aspect of the standardization has priority.