ABNF or code fragments?

Off on a tangent, in this discussion.

On 23 feb 2010, at 01:46, Philip Jägenstedt wrote:

> On Tue, 23 Feb 2010 04:36:03 +0800, Jack Jansen <Jack.Jansen@cwi.nl> wrote:
> 
>> 
>> On 22 feb 2010, at 05:10, Philip Jägenstedt wrote:
>> 
>>> There are two changes I would like to make, previously mentioned deep in some thread:
>>> 
>>> 1. Drop the trailing s from the npt syntax, which seems not to serve any real purpose as it only adds (a little) complexity but doesn't help disambiguate from any other form. It also isn't what is used in RTSP, if we want to align.
>>> 
>>> 2. Drop the 'quotes' around strings, which are completely unnecessary when spaces have to be percent-encoded anyway. Simply following the rules for splitting name-value pairs yields a string with any special characters decoded.
>> 
>> 
>> Would this work if I had, say, an ampersand (or any other special character) in my track name?
>> 
>> I think it may work: IIRC the quotes were added before we referenced rfc3986 for the string parameters, and I think the "unreserved" character set is restricted enough.
>> 
>> But: someone with a strong ABNF background needs to check. We want to make sure that "http://www.example.com/id=my%26name&t=5" actually splits on & before turning the %26 into an ampersand.
> 
> The splitting is defined our own spec, in http://www.w3.org/2008/WebVideo/Fragments/WD-media-fragments-spec/#processing-name-value-components


That code seems to do what is needed.

But now I have a more serious question: it seems that the current draft has gotten all ABNF removed, and replaced by code fragments??!?

I don't remember that such a change has come up during a teleconf. Moreover, it is something that I have serious misgivings about: in a standards document we should use formal declarative languages such as ABNF as much as possible, and not vague english-based procedural pseudo-code...
--
Jack Jansen, <Jack.Jansen@cwi.nl>, http://www.cwi.nl/~jack
If I can't dance I don't want to be part of your revolution -- Emma Goldman

Received on Tuesday, 23 February 2010 09:48:08 UTC