IBM Version 5 manual Technical benefits of XML, XML in new innovations, Voice XML

1.3.3 XML in new innovations

There have such a large number of innovations based on XML, they are too numerous to list. New ideas are now based in XML. Entrepreneurial companies now cannot avoid XML and its standards.

Voice XML

In October, 2001, the World Wide Consortium (w3C) announced the first release of a working draft for the Voice Extensible Markup Language (VoiceXML). VoiceXML has these purposes among others:

￿It will hide designers and developers from low-level platform specific details.

￿It will promote portability across implementation platforms.

￿It will be a common language for platform providers, development tool providers and content providers.

￿It would provide features to support complex dialogs, yet be easy to use for simple interactions.

￿It is designed to cater for audio dialogs that would feature digitized audio, speech recognition, telephony and synthesized speech. Its goal would be to deliver advantages of Web-based development and context delivery for interactive voice response applications.

Scalable Vector Graphics

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is an XML based language for describing two-dimensional graphics. Its main use is in Geographical Information Systems (GIS) where travel maps, council boundaries, forest fires and natural disasters can be processed and displayed independently of technical platforms. It will be able to integrate with non-GIS software, and also allow graphic elements to non-graphic.

The benefits of this new XML derivative are not difficult to comprehend. It uses are many. For example, insurance companies can estimate and forecast natural disaster claims; and scientists can study environmental impacts, and local and federal governments for city and town planning.

1.4 Technical benefits of XML

Fundamentally, the basics of XML have not changed. What has changed is the extent XML is being used today, and how it is incorporated into technologies for the future. XML offers many benefits, some of which are stated below.

Chapter 1. XML overview 7