2396bis - new productions

Well, I'm confused as to what some of these new productions in the -05 draft
(of 2396bis) mean. (Thought everything was more or less hunky dory up til
-04, apart from allowing dot segment normalizations to be applied across the
board on all URI forms - both relative and absolute. Though did have some
general sympathies with this in terms of arriving at a greater level of
uniformity for the URI spec.)

But now I'm totally lost. What does

	segment-nz 
or
	segment-nzc

mean? ('nz' anyone? - 'nzc'?)

It's getting much tougher to understand what the BNF is actually trying to
describe. An ebbing away of English. Of course, these could just be treated
as mere placeholders in the URI rule set. But then it could also have been
made just a little bit more accessible to lesser mortals. (Or rather, the
engineers that need to implement this stuff.;)

I'm also not too crazy about the following - although these are commented in
sect. 3.3 (unlike 'segment-nz[c]' as far as ):

	path-abempty
	path-abs 
	path-noscheme 
	path-rootless 
	path-empty

'path-abempty', for example, looks to be a little cryptic - and doesn't
really balance against 'path-abs'. 'path-noscheme' is also a little
confusing.

The grammar may be tighter, but it is also much more difficult to follow or
to program against. Maybe just a question of renamimg or else commenting the
terms better in the relevant sections.

Tony

ps/
Also 'pct-encoded' does seem IMHO a weaker term than 'hex-encoded'. One
talks to form, the other to function. Just a personal take.


Tony Hammond

New Technology, Nature Publishing Group
4 Crinan Street, London N1 9XW, UK 

tel:+44-20-7843-4659
mailto:t.hammond@nature.com




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Received on Thursday, 24 June 2004 06:30:20 UTC