Re: [XPath] A.2.2 Parsing note

[Note this is in no way an official reply from the WG.]

We did an analysis about eight months ago, and concluded they carried more 
than informative information.  Further, while most of the states could be 
inferred from the BNF, it could be very difficult to do so.  But the 
issues are relatively complex (and also subject to opinion), and there 
have been recent changes since then that could have changed the results of 
this analysis... for instance the semi-colons in the XQuery prolog.

> (And if so, how?)

One thing I am exploring is expressing these tables as a mini-bnf (you 
yourself may have suggested this in the past), either to do validation of 
the tables, or to propose to the WG as a replacement for the tables. This 
is active work and I'll report our results to the WG probably at the next 
F2F.

Another possibility is to go ahead and try to generate the tables from the 
bnf+some hints.  If we could do that, and the hints could be made fairly 
simply, perhaps we could provide all needed lexical states as part of the 
BNF.  It's just a theory though... it hasn't progressed very far and I 
have my doubts.  If we could make it work, it would be, in my opinion, the 
best option.

-scott

Received on Wednesday, 28 January 2004 20:20:46 UTC