8.1 Hello, Web

Ever since the appearance of Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie's classic book The C Programming Language, it has been almost mandatory to introduce a new language by giving a Hello, World sample. So here it is: a VoiceXML page which speaks "Hello, World" and hangs up.

   
                Hello, World.              
 

In VoiceXML, the terms "page" and "document" are synonymous. In this case, the page is also a complete application. An application will usually include other pages which are brought in via hyperlinks, as we will see later. We'll assume that this page is stored on the Web server in a file named HelloWorld.vxml.

At the core of this page is the prompt tag, which instructs the browser to speak the text value of the tag (that is, the text between the start and end tags) using text-to-speech.

As you might guess, ends the browser session and hangs up the call.

(Typographical note: we often use in descriptive text as a synonym for "the tagname tag". This should not necessarily be understood to indicate the correct syntax, which in this case is ).

The rest of the code is scaffolding we need so that we have a place to put the prompt and disconnect tags. First is a standard XML declaration:

This is required for any XML document; a VoiceXML page is no exception.

Next is the vxml