RE: QA Review of VoiceXML 2.1 (23 March 2004 version)

Hi, Dom,

Thanks for your feedback on VoiceXML 2.1. The Voice Browser Working Group
will discuss your comments and get back to you with a response.

Matt
VoiceXML 2.1 Editor, W3C Voice Browser Group
-----Original Message-----
From: www-voice-request@w3.org [mailto:www-voice-request@w3.org] On Behalf
Of Dominique Hazaël-Massieux
Sent: Wednesday, July 21, 2004 5:09 AM
To: www-voice@w3.org
Subject: 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- the references to XML 1.0 are outdated (latest version is from February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

Received on Wednesday, 21 July 2004 14:21:14 UTC