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W3C creates specification for device independence

By David Worthington

February 10, 2009 — Knowing that people no longer access the Web solely via their PCs, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has published a standard that it says will help developers adapt their applications to different inputs modes on a variety of devices.

The W3C today published EMMA, the Extensible MultiModal Annotation. EMMA is a specification for Web applications to represent user input from different sources, effectively separating the logic layer of applications from the input layer.

EMMA provides a single framework for representing user intent from different types of modalities, including hand gestures, handwriting and natural language, according to Deborah Dahl, chair of the Multimodal Interaction Working Group at W3C. Those inputs can be combined to determine the full representation of the user's intent because each one is represented in a similar way, she explained.

That redundancy helps EMMA account for ambiguity in user input to help overcome errors. "Speech is not as cut and dried as a mouse click. If there is more than one possibility for the user, user intent can represent a bunch of alternatives," she said.

EMMA also makes supplementary information (such as the interaction date) about interactions available, which may be useful to developers as they strive towards accuracy.

W3C increasingly recognizes the device independence of applications and acknowledges that mainstream developers have to deal with small devices that have non-traditional inputs, said Dahl. W3C also believes that multi-modal applications, where different inputs are combined, will benefit people with disabilities.

"What we'll see first is that companies that have speech application development platforms will start to incorporate [EMMA] into their products," said Dahl. She added that development tools for multi-modal applications would follow.

"Big companies have the resources to do anything that they want in a proprietary way. It is hard for anyone without a proprietary ecosystem to get into a multi-modal world. EMMA will make a big difference for smaller enterprises," she said.

Related Search Term(s): W3C

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