W3C EBNF catalog?

Hi,

As I was having a cursory look at the definition of the RIF language in
EBNF [1], and wanted to quickly check the validity of the grammar using
existing tools such as abnfgen [2] or bnf_check, the following (somewhat
unstructured) thoughts occurred to me:
• for better or for worse, XML defined its own EBNF syntax [4] that
differs from the ISO standard [5]; given that a number of W3C specs keep
using that specific syntax, and given that there are more tools that
recognize the ISO syntax, it would be nice to have a converter from the
W3C syntax into the ISO one — does anyone know if that exists?

• RIF refers to a number of EBNF defined in other W3C specs (in
particular XML Namespaces and SPARQL); I wonder if having a catalog of
the existing EBNF defined in various specifications wouldn't facilitate
both the re-usage of these EBNF and their testing — right now, to create
the full RIF EBNF grammar requires a lot of easy-to-get wrong copy &
pasting, that an EBNF catalog could presumably facilitate; is this a
goofy idea? has anyone heard of a tool allowing to manage/catalog EBNF
productions?

Dom

1.
http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/CR-rif-dtb-20091001/#sec-shortcuts-constants
2. http://www.quut.com/abnfgen/
3. http://www.icosaedro.it/bnf_chk/index.html
4. http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#sec-notation
5. http://www.iso.org/iso/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=26153

Received on Thursday, 29 April 2010 16:18:11 UTC