Re: progress on BNF conversion

Hi,

in the meantime I have made some progress changing the BNF productions 
so that they actually become parseable; see 
<http://www.w3.org/Protocols/HTTP/1.1/rfc2616bis/draft-lafon-rfc2616bis-latest.html> 
and 
<http://www.w3.org/Protocols/HTTP/1.1/rfc2616bis/draft-lafon-rfc2616bis-latest-from-previous.abnf.diff.html>.

One thing I'm currently looking at is to remove rules defined in prose 
when possible. For instance:

      token          = 1*<any CHAR except CTLs or separators>
      separators     = "(" | ")" | "<" | ">" | "@"
                     | "," | ";" | ":" | "\" | <">
                     | "/" | "[" | "]" | "?" | "="
                     | "{" | "}" | SP | HT

could be rewritten as

     separators     = "(" | ")" | "<" | ">" | "@"
                    | "," | ";" | ":" | "\" | DQUOTE
                    | "/" | "[" | "]" | "?" | "="
                    | "{" | "}" | SP | HT

     tchar          = "!" | "#" | "$" | "%" | "&" | "'" | "*" | "+" | "-"
                    | "." | "^" | "_" | "`" | "|" | "~" | DIGIT | ALPHA
                      ; any CHAR except CTLs or separators
     token          = 1*tchar

(unless I broke it, of course :-).

Which leads me to the obvious question: was it really intended that 
things like method names and header names can contain all these characters?

BR, Julian

(planning to submit a draft defining the "!" method).