URI spec production path-empty uses prose-val ABNF mechanism on purpose?

I'm trying to do some automated processing of the URI spec,
and I bumped into:

path-empty    = 0<pchar>

I wonder if those <> are there on purpose. I suppose
it doesn't matter; 0 repetitions of anything is the empty string.


I doubt this mechanism was invoked on purpose, though:

prose-val      =  "<" *(%x20-3D / %x3F-7E) ">"
                               ; bracketed string of SP and VCHAR
                                  without angles
                               ; prose description, to be used as
                                  last resort

http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2234#page-9


for reference... this path-empty production
shows up in the issues list under 02 Apr 2004, draft 05
http://labs.apache.org/webarch/uri/rev-2002/issues.html#044-empty-path

I also traced it down in SVN:
http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/labs/webarch/tags/uri/draft-05/rev-2002/rfc2396bis.xml

503091   fielding    path-empty    = 0&lt;pchar&gt;
r503091 | fielding | 2004-04-01 19:01:20 -0600 (Thu, 01 Apr 2004) | 2
lines
finish the last change and copy to collected bnf


-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
gpg D3C2 887B 0F92 6005 C541  0875 0F91 96DE 6E52 C29E

Received on Tuesday, 18 November 2008 06:12:21 UTC