- From: David Sheets <kosmo.zb@gmail.com>
- Date: Mon, 24 Sep 2012 18:03:58 -0700
- To: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
- Cc: Alexandre Morgaut <Alexandre.Morgaut@4d.com>, whatwg <whatwg@whatwg.org>
On Mon, Sep 24, 2012 at 5:23 PM, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote: > On Mon, 24 Sep 2012, David Sheets wrote: >> >> Is there an issue with defining WHATWG-URL syntax as a grammar extension >> to the URI syntax in RFC3986? > > In general, BNF isn't very useful for defining the parsing rules when you > also need to handle non-conforming content in a correct manner. Really it > is only useful for saying whether or not content is conforming. Your conforming WHATWG-URL syntax will have production rule alphabets which are supersets of the alphabets in RFC3986. This is what I propose you define and it does not necessarily have to be in BNF (though a production rule language of some sort probably isn't a bad idea). If you read my mail carefully, you will notice that I address the non-conforming identifier case in the initial canonicalization algorithm. This normalization step is separate from the syntax of conforming WHATWG-URLs and would define how non-conforming strings are interpreted as conforming strings. The parsing algorithm then provides a map from these strings into a data structure. Error recovery and extended syntax for conforming representations are orthogonal. How will WHATWG-URLs which use the syntax extended from RFC3986 map into RFC3986 URI references for systems that only support those?
Received on Tuesday, 25 September 2012 01:06:45 UTC