- From: Michael Dyck <jmdyck@ibiblio.org>
- Date: Fri, 13 Feb 2004 18:21:00 -0800
- To: public-qt-comments@w3.org
XQuery 1.0: An XML Query Language W3C Working Draft 12 November 2003 Here are some comments from http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-qt-comments/2002Nov/0090.html that did not receive a response from the WG. It turns out that, in my recent submission: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-qt-comments/2004Feb/0193.html I already re-stated many of the unanswered comments from the Nov 2002 posting. These two are the remainder. ------ A.2.1 White Space Rules "white space is needed to disambiguate the token" In my recent posting, I suggested changing "token" to "grammar". But I think I prefer what I said in Nov 2002: The phrase "disambiguate the token" is, I believe, a misuse of the concept of ambiguity. At any rate, I think it would be plainer and more accurate to say that whitespace is needed to prevent two adjacent tokens from being (mis-)recognized as one. For instance, consider the character-sequence a- b Note that there is a space before the 'b'. It thus has only one derivation from Module (the "a minus b" one), so there is no ambiguity involved, no disambiguation needed. Nevertheless, it is still a case in which (I assume) whitespace is needed between 'a' and '-' to prevent the longest-match rule from (mis-)recognizing 'a-' as a QName. "Special whitespace notation" Note that only the *notation* is special. The treatment of whitespace characters in "ws: explicit" and "ws: significant" productions is *not* special: they treat them like any other character, just as the XML spec does. It's the *unmarked* productions that have special interpretation with respect to whitespace. -Michael Dyck
Received on Friday, 13 February 2004 21:21:55 UTC