In the draft specifications for webscope and moya, I mention a “versatile text input box” and “natural language command” respectively. I briefly describe these ideas in the Multimodal Web User Agent design concept.
In light of a Lifehacker article hailing the return of the command line, I thought I would clarify these thoughts further in a new design concept page, Natural Language Command Line.
We are seeing this trend all over the place, a versatile text input element which can be used to find information or carry out actions with a much more loosely defined syntax than the traditional command line. In my implementation, a user agent accepts user input and turns it into ASCII text to be passed as a query string in an HTTP request. The receiving web server then interprets the user's command and attempts to carry out the requested action. Think of it as combining the address bar and search bar in Firefox and adding something new.