Proposal to W3C Voice Browser Working Group for VXML

I have worked on 2 VXML projects as a software Engineer, and having experienced the nightmarish issues with maintaining the Speech prompts and wav files matched and in good directory structure for use in the voice portals, it had me thinking if there could be a easier way.
 

The number of prompts (and wav files) is directly proportional to the size of the voice portal being developed, and it's on the development team to maintain a code base with properly devised directory structure to store these wav files. It is also burdened on them to maintain separate pieces of config/properties file for the in-numerable text dialogs to be used. 



Good development practice rules against hardcoded values and also about maintaining a single properties file, but that in turn does increase the complexity of maintaining all the prompt details/links in one file. With the innumerable prompts in a Custom voice application, if a single prompt has to be changed, it would required the developer to go thru the whole application, trying to decipher the call flow and the associated prompts for it. Even after accomplishing the task, a doubt still lingers in the mind.



Well, this did make me think about what would make it easier to maintain it. Thus I came up with this solution that could decrease the complexity of understanding the code and retrieving the prompts (and wav files) by mapping the prompts in a specific XML file, we will call this PromptConfig.XML Document.


Please find my proposal attached.

Regards,
Alex Robin Marian