Re: Who can express URL syntax with BNF

Tony Sanders (sanders@BSDI.COM)
Fri, 29 Apr 1994 13:30:31 -0500

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

SPACEJUMP and TEXTSEARCH are attributes of an object, not methods.
I have suggested in the past that they be moved into a more generic
attribute specifier but I haven't seen any change in the spec yet.
TimBL, what do you think?

The server should use the URL to disambiguate whatever it needs to disambiguate:
GET /place-order?... form
GET /visual-index?... spacejump
GET /data?... text search
GET /library?... library-style search (a=author, t=title, s=subject)
GET /database?... SQL search
GET /listing?... regular expression
etc, etc.

--sanders