Moving forward on ISSUE-19

<http://www.w3.org/2008/WebVideo/Fragments/tracker/issues/19>

I've drafted what I think the first steps towards resolving ISSUE-19  
should look like:

<http://people.opera.com/philipj/2010/11/04/media-fragments-spec/overview.html>

The main changes are:

* I've split the syntax into two levels: (1) the general name-value  
structure (namevalues production) and (2) the dimension syntaxes,  
operating on the Unicode strings extracted from the first pass. I've also  
been clear(er) on what components are, and note that as a result the URI  
spec requires percent-decoding to happen after parsing out the names and  
values.

* I've reworked the section "Processing name-value components" and  
"Processing name-value lists" and made them normative by moving them into  
section 5. They still contain algorithms, but they are much smaller than  
before. If anyone can express the same thing in prose, that would be fine.

* I've removed the production rules that are not used and were in any case  
nowhere in the normative part of the spec before I began editing. This  
includes, notably, the mediasegment production.

What's left to do:

* The dimension sections need to be cleaned up and be given better hooks  
for section "Processing name-value lists", so that it is abundantly clear  
what happens with e.g. #t=10&t=20.

* There needs to be stronger language about validity. We should state that  
any unrecognized names or values are invalid, as is repeating the same  
dimension twice.

To make it simpler to review the changes, I've also prepared a set of  
patches that apply to WWW/2008/WebVideo/Fragments/WD-media-fragments-spec  
in CVS.

<http://people.opera.com/philipj/2010/11/04/0001-Fix-indendation-of-timeprefix-timeparam-syntax.patch>
<http://people.opera.com/philipj/2010/11/04/0002-Change-odd-use-of-fragmenting-to-addressing.patch>
<http://people.opera.com/philipj/2010/11/04/0003-Replace-uses-of-field-value-with-name-value-for-cons.patch>
<http://people.opera.com/philipj/2010/11/04/0004-Fix-RFC-3986-typo-was-3896.patch>
<http://people.opera.com/philipj/2010/11/04/0005-Define-parsing-normatively-and-similar-to-query-comp.patch>
<http://people.opera.com/philipj/2010/11/04/0006-Clean-up-and-update-ABNF-references.patch>
<http://people.opera.com/philipj/2010/11/04/0007-Replace-utf8string-with-unistring.patch>
<http://people.opera.com/philipj/2010/11/04/0008-Purge-some-unused-production-rules.patch>

0005, 0007 and 0008 are the most important, the others are fixing small  
issues.

Please take the time to review this so that we can perhaps finally move on  
with ISSUE-19.

-- 
Philip Jägenstedt
Core Developer
Opera Software

Received on Thursday, 4 November 2010 10:01:18 UTC