Modality Component to Host Environment DOM Requirements and Capabilities Assessment

This document describes the DOM capabilities needed to support a heterogeneous multimodal environment and the current state of DOM interfaces supporting those capabilities. These DOM interfaces are used between modality components and their host environment in the W3C Multimodal Interaction Framework as proposed by the W3C Multimodal Interaction Activity. The Multimodal Interaction Framework separates multimodal systems into a set of functional units, including Input and Output components, an Interaction Manager, Session Components, System and Environment, and Application Functions. In order for those functional components to interact with each other to form an application interpreter, the browser implementation must allow for communication and coordination between those components. This DOM interface identifies the DOM APIs used to communicate and coordinate at the browser implementation level. Multimodal browsers can be stand-alone or distributed systems.