XPath Grammar

Here are some minor comments on the XPath grammar, mostly readability issues,

A.1.1 Syntactic Constructs

1. I find is easier to read if productions are shown in some form of 
dependency order, i.e. new ones build on old ones. For example, Digit should 
be defined before IntegerLiteral. This is also consistent with the XML spec 
ordering.

2. A URLLiteral is a StringLiteral so should be defined that way.

3. URLLiteral does not appear to be used anywhere in this spec.

4. FuncName is defined equivalently to a QName.

5. There is a quite a mixture of reuse of productions from XML Names and 
redefinition via another name. It appears that at least some of this has been 
caused by not having suitable productions defined elsewhere. The result is 
'S' being defined in-terms of 'WhitespaceChar' rather than been taken from 
the XML spec. I find the mixture quite confusing where new names are been 
used to define well known ideas, see 'Nmchar' redundant as a redefinition of 
'NCNameChar'. As you can't create the needed productions in the other specs 
would it not be better to simply not use 'XML Names' as a reference and 
include all needed productions with there standard definition. An note could 
make it clear that they are deliberately identical.

C.1 Normative References

1. The reference to 'XML' shows a link to 
'http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/REC-xml-20001006' but
actually links to 'http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/REC-xml-19980210'.

Received on Thursday, 22 August 2002 15:03:05 UTC