Who can express URL syntax with BNF

Gunter (hille@rz.informatik.uni-hamburg.d400.de)
Mon, 25 Apr 1994 10:43:59 +0200

No, I did not read the www-talk archive. But the parser of my HTTP server
for Windows will be an ugly piece of code, if it cannot decide what to do:

GET /1234?Name=foo&Age=21 HTTP/1.0 seems to be a form, handled specially
GET /1234?Name=foo HTTP/1.0 is a form or a textsearch
GET /1234?Name+foo HTTP/1.0 is a textsearch
GET /1234?Name%20foo HTTP/1.0 is a textsearch as well?
GET /1234?777,888 HTTP/1.0 is a specejump (or textsearch?)

So, how to decide whether to process forms, do a textsearch or do a spacejump.

HTTP protocol states that spacejump and textsearch methods are done via GET.
Why don't we use SPACEJUMP or TEXTSEARCH to disambiguate our syntax?

Gunter