Speaking of Standards

Last week on July 12th, the W3C’s Web Real-Time Communications Working Group (“WebRTC” – one half of the overall “RTCWEB Initiative”) held a conference call to help advance the work of the group.

Group leader Harald Alvestrand posted a summary of the call to the public webrtc mailing list. A set of minutes was later sent to the list and an IRC log is also available. The main focus right now is on getting full clarity of the requirements and beginning to define the API.

There will also be a face-to-face meeting on Saturday, July 23rd, in Quebec City, Canada. Registration is open and a good number of folks are already planning to attend. The date was chosen because IETF 81 starts July 24th there in Queubec City and many of the W3C WebRTC participants will also be joining in the RTCWEB working group meeting of the IETF. (Confused, yet?)

More discussion of all of this can be found on the public-webrtc mailing list. Great discussion currently going on… the time to join is really now if you want to help shape how this communication occurs between browsers.

We are very pleased to see today that the W3C has published CCXML (Call Control XML) as a formal “Recommendation“. Within the W3C standards process, this is the the highest level that a standard can attain and is the result of a great amount of work by a great number of people over many years. To celebrate, we have :

• issued a news release celebrating the milestone and discussing Voxeo’s involvement and our use of CCXML within our products; and
• created a CCXML Resource page where you can find links to CCXML-related tutorials, white papers, source code and more.

As the news release mentions, Voxeo’s CTO RJ Auburn has been involved with CCXML since the early days and is the chair of the CCXML working group within the W3C. Voxeo’s Dan Burnett is now the chair of the overall Voice Browser Working Group under which CCXML and VoiceXML fall. Voxeo Prophecy was the first commercial implementation of CCXML, was the first (and remains the only) engine to support 100% of the CCXML specification and pass the entire W3C test suite for CCXML, and has been licensed out by other companies looking to include CCXML inside their products and services.

We are delighted to see this formal step in the W3C standards process and look forward to seeing even more applications being built out there that use the power of CCXML!

We are very pleased to be the hosts this week for the face-to-face meetings of the W3C’s Voice Browser Working Group (VB) and Multimodal Interaction Working Group (MMI) at Voxeo’s main office in Orlando, Florida.

The MMI Working Group meets Monday and Tuesday. Both groups meet together on Wednesday morning, and then the VB group meets Wednesday afternoon through Friday.

The MMI Working Group will be working on the MMI Architecture Specification and EMMA 1.1. (No web page up yet on EMMA 1.1, but use cases are available as is EMMA 1.0.)

The Voice Browser Working Group will be working on SCXML and VoiceXML 3. Given that Voxeo’s Dan Burnett is the Co-Chair of the Voice Browser Working Group and lead editor on the VoiceXML 3 specification, we’re glad to serve as the host for one of the group’s face-to-face meetings.

We welcome all the W3C working group participants to Orlando and do hope they enjoy both our new office and also the surrounding area!

In about 20 minutes at 1pm US Eastern (5pm UTC), the “Web Real-Time Communications Working Group” of the W3C will be holding its first conference call. As announced yesterday, the call will primarily be about introductions, reviewing the working group charter and determining the next steps. If you are able to join today, the info is:

Phone: +1 617 761 6200 or SIP: zakim@voip.w3.org
Conference Code: 26631
IRC channel: #webrtc

If you aren’t able to attend but are interested in the effort, the best bet is to join the “public-webrtc” mailing list.

This is the W3C side of the “RTCWEB” initiative I’ve been writing about here, which is essentially looking at how we standardize real-time communications from within web browsers and other similar apps. Definitely an effort worth paying attention to!

Yesterday the W3C published a Proposed Recommendation for “Voice Browser Call Control: CCXML Version 1.0” and also asked for any final comments to be received by June 10, 2011. The CCXML Proposed Recommendation can be found at:

http://www.w3.org/TR/2011/PR-ccxml-20110510/

The list of changes in the proposed recommendation is at:

http://www.w3.org/TR/2011/PR-ccxml-20110510/#changes-pr

and the W3C has very helpfully provided a diff version showing the changes from the past revision.

Given that Voxeo CTO RJ Auburn is the Editor-in-Chief of the CCXML specification and that we do quite a good bit with CCXML (and indeed many other folks in the industry actually license our CCXML engine to use in their products), we’re very pleased to see this Proposed Recommendation come out. Within the W3C process, this is nearing the final stage where CCXML will become a full “Recommendation”. Kudos to RJ and all the folks involved with the W3C Voice Browser Working Group for moving the specification along to where it is.

If you have never worked with CCXML, we have a lengthy set of CCXML tutorials over on our documentation site and have also written a good bit about CCXML over the years on our Voxeo Developers Corner blog. If you aren’t familiar with “state machines”, you might want to start with the post I wrote about state machines and CCXML (and James Bond) as that may help explain a bit about how CCXML works.

You can of course try out CCXML for free either in our hosted Evolution developer portal or by downloading Prophecy to your local system (for Windows, Linux or Mac OS X).

For those of you following the ongoing “RTCWEB” work to bring about standards for real-time communications from within web browsers, there are now two new public mailing lists that you can join – and are where all the RTCWEB activity is now intended to happen.

On the IETF side, as part of the new charter for the RTCWEB work, there is now a mailing list at:

https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/rtcweb

You can subscribe and also view the archive from that page.

On the W3C side, a working group is still forming there, but the mailing list is now up for subscription at:

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webrtc/

The W3C list was literally created today, so there has not yet been any activity on that list.

The work of the RTCWEB initiative is now moving into the standards bodies… and so if you want to monitor or participate in the work, you’ll need to join those mailing lists.

Consider my mind blown. I have to confess that I would never have thought of the W3C – a standards organization – launching a branding campaign around HTML5!

Kudos to the W3C for doing something surprising!

And something that is incredibly important… we need to promote HTML5 and all of its related standards because in that direction lies the future of the “Open Internet”. For the sake of innovation… for the sake of competition… for the sake of us all getting better services and better capabilities… we need an open Internet!

And the standards that make up what we commonly call “HTML5″ are one of the key elements of an open Interenet. So kudos to the W3C for launching this campaign… I hope that many sites will use the logo and promote the availability of HTML5-compliant sites. You can download various versions of the logo at (UPDATED WITH W3C LINK):

http://www.w3.org/html/logo/

The page has some great links to HTML5-related resources, too. Well worth a look. You can also purchase T-shirts or request some stickers.

Also, Mashable.com had a post up this morning with comments from the designer and other information.

UPDATE: (The W3C does have the logo hosted on their website, but some of the media stories were linking to the Google App Engine site instead of the W3C site.) It seems that all the attention has overwhelmed the Google App Engine account where the logo site was served out of:

One wonders why the W3C didn’t put the logo up on their own web servers, but maybe this was faster/easier for the design firm. Whatever the case, hopefully the site will be back to being available soon…

VoiceXML 3.0 specification continues its march toward release with the W3C Voice Browser Working Group releasing the latest working draft of the VoiceXML 3.0 specification at:

http://www.w3.org/TR/2010/WD-voicexml30-20100831/

This newest draft lists these changes:

• In Section 8.2.5 replaced fetchtimeout with {audio, document, grammar, object, script}fetchtimeout.
• Many, many editorial changes, including the removal of many out-of-date editorial notes
• In section 6.5.2 adjusted text to allow for SSML documents containing extensions.
• In section 6.6.1.1 added fetching attributes by reference to section 8.1.
• Also updated all other uses of these attributes to point to section 8.1.

• Added media fetch properties into section 8.2.5.
• Removed <media> as a child of <property> in section 6.6.1.

As I’ve mentioned previously, I’ve personally found that the best way to understand the changes is to view the “diff” of the version from the previous version at:

http://www.w3.org/TR/2010/WD-voicexml30-20101216/diff.html

Voxeo’s Dan Burnett, co-editor-in-chief of the specification, indicated that this working draft was primarily focused on editorial changes and cleanup of the text. He said there will be more substantive changes in the next draft of the VoiceXML 3 specification targeted right now to come out at the end of February.

Given our interest in VoiceXML and VoiceXML 3, we’ll be continuing to write about it here… you can see related stories at:

http://blogs.voxeo.com/speakingofstandards/category/voicexml/

Today we were very pleased to see the W3C announced that Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) version 1.1 was approved as a Recommendation. The specification is available at:

http://www.w3.org/TR/speech-synthesis11/

SSML is used to control how text is rendered as human-like speech. It includes elements for describing the voice, pitch, speed, and other characteristics of human speech needed to ensure proper output prosody and pronunciation.

Requirements for enhancing SSML 1.0 were collected during workshops held in China, Greece, and India. The new SSML 1.1 W3C recommendation enhances SSML 1.0 to provide better support for a broader set of natural (human) languages.

In particular, SSML 1.1 supports

• a new registry for pronunciation alphabets that describe the pronunciation of words and phrases. Developers use pronunciation alphabets to describe precisely the pronunciations of words and phrases. An example is pinyin, a common way of writing pronunciations for Mandarin Chinese.
• the Pronunciation Lexicon Specification (PLS) to allow for standardized independent collections of pronunciation information that could be also be used by speech recognition engines. (more info about PLS)
• finer author control over voice selection and behavior upon encountering unexpected language content.
• better token delimiting for languages that (1) do not use white space as a token boundary identifier, such as Chinese, Thai, and Japanese, (2) that use white space for syllable segmentation, such as Vietnamese, and (3) that use white space for other purposes, such as Urdu.

Much of the work on this specification took place in China, a country with languages that are quite different from European and American languages. This is the first W3C recommendation in which Asians played a major role.

When published, the final version can be found at http://www.w3.org/TR/speech-synthesis11/.

Voxeo’s own Dan Burnett was a co-editor of the SSML 1.1 specification and contributed this to the W3C’s Testimonials page:

SSML is an important part of the overall ecosystem of W3C standards enabling speech across a variety of applications. SSML in particular provides a key way to render richer, more natural sounding speech. We are particularly pleased that SSML 1.1 provides advancements in several key areas, including support for Asian and Eastern European languages as well as improved audio controls for authors. The headway in the Recommendation is the result of the work of the dedicated individuals and companies around the world who value the importance of standards work and support the W3C Voice Browser Working Group. Voxeo is very proud to have been involved in this significant global accomplishment.

We’re pleased to see SSML 1.1 reaching this milestone and congratulate all involved.

Have you ever been coding in HTML or CSS and found yourself wondering exactly what the attributes were to a given element? Or wondering what values an attribute can have?

If so, the W3C offers this great “cheatsheet” at:

http://www.w3.org/2009/cheatsheet/

where you can simply enter a search string and look up info about HTML, CSS, SVG or XPath.

For instance, say I wanted to know more about the <div> tag in HTML, I can just enter it and then get a result with links to learn more about the possible attributes or to click over and read the actual specification:

The site nicely provides suggestions as you type. For instance, I started typing “align” and received these suggestions:

As you can probably guess from the tabs in the screenshots, the site also provides information about development for mobile browsers and guidance around accessiblity, internationalization and typography. A great resource for anyone who is coding up their site. Visit the cheatsheet at the W3C’s site to try it out yourself.