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IBM, Opera push XHTML+Voice
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By Larry Garfield, Thursday 25 July 2002  
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Software giant IBM and browser business Opera have teamed up to bring voice-enabled XHTML to a gadget near you. Just don't say "reset" to your phone at the wrong time.
IBM and Opera have announced their plan to jointly develop a multi-modal browser based on their XHTML+Voice (X+V) specification, targeted at mobile devices. They expect the beta version of the browser to be available this fall.
"Multimodal" browsers are based around the idea of offering multiple input methods simultaneously (such as keyboard and voice), just as "multimedia" PCs and applications back in the early 1990s were a fancy way of saying that the computer supported multiple output methods simultaneously (such as screen text and images and audio). IBM and Opera are trying to build a system whereby web developers can create interactive web applications that allow the user to tap on the screen and write text, or simply speak their commands to the web page itself.
The XHTML+Voice specification was jointly developed by Opera and IBM and finalized last December. XHTML 1.1 is the current World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standard for web page design, and is a recasting of traditional HTML in XML, to make it easier to parse, more picky about the developer writing valid code, more modular. IBM and Opera took the VoiceXML specification, which defined strictly voice-based applications, modularized it the same way the W3C has modularized XHTML, SVG, and other specifications, and then mixed the XHTML and VoiceXML modules together to create an XML-based specification that supports both XHTML code and VoiceXML code, and allows the two to interact. For example, a developer could write a web page in XHTML, then add extra VoiceXML-derived tags to it so that the browser can prompt the user to, say, select a city, through the speaker. The user would then speak a city name into the device, and it the browser would interpret it, then use that information to fill in the form and submit it. XHTML+Voice is currently listed as a W3C note, meaning that while the W3C hosts the specification, it was not involved in its development nor does it support or endorse it.
The companies did not specify which platforms they would be supporting with their new browser. However, the cornerstone of Opera's existing browser technology is that the engine itself is platform agnostic, so to port it to a new platform they need only to write an application for that platform and drop the engine in place. As a result, Opera's browser is avilable on a half dozen different platforms. It is likely that they will take a similar approach with their new XHTML+Voice browser, so when it is finally released it will probably be available on multiple handheld platforms.
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