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Bug 30006 - [XP31] Ignorable whitespace (probably editorial)
Summary: [XP31] Ignorable whitespace (probably editorial)
Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME
Alias: None
Product: XPath / XQuery / XSLT
Classification: Unclassified
Component: XPath 3.1 (show other bugs)
Version: Candidate Recommendation
Hardware: PC Windows NT
: P2 normal
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Jonathan Robie
QA Contact: Mailing list for public feedback on specs from XSL and XML Query WGs
URL:
Whiteboard:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2016-11-16 21:41 UTC by Abel Braaksma
Modified: 2016-12-06 16:44 UTC (History)
1 user (show)

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Description Abel Braaksma 2016-11-16 21:41:42 UTC
When trying to find out whether the production for cast as required a space between "cast" and "as" (I know it requires one, just wanted to see it written) I went through the following:

1) Reading section A.1 EBNF, which points to A.1.1 Notation, and hit a dead end.

2) Searched for "whitespace rules" and came to A.2.4 whitespace Rules, here ignorable whitespace is discussed which suggests (but does not specify) that whitespace is not required, because of the term "ignorable" and "may occur between terminals".

3) At this point I decided to lookup XML 1.0 EBNF whether that had anything conclusion. A dead end again.

4) Eventually I found A.2.2 Terminal Delimitation, where the correct rules are explained.

I was wondering whether 

I) A.1.1, in its section on terminals, could point forward to the section on terminal delimitation (which is *not* in the same main section on EBNF, I mean, not under A.1).

II) We could make the language under *ignorable whitespace* somewhat explicit to the fact that while whitespace is ignorable, it is often required to separate two symbols, even though we don't have ws-explicit everywhere.

III) With, or as alternative to II, add a backward link under A.2.4 on ignorable whitespace to A.2.2, to signify it is often *not* ignorable.


Or basically anything that removes the confusion I felt today (I am not saying the rules are wrong, I just think they are somewhat counter-intuitive or slightly lacking).
Comment 1 Michael Dyck 2016-12-06 05:52:06 UTC
Yeah, in my opinion, the lexical level is kind of a mess, editorially speaking. I raised some points here:
   https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-xsl-query/2016Mar/0036.html
but didn't get any interest.

I think we could do something along the lines you suggest.
Comment 2 Jonathan Robie 2016-12-06 16:44:34 UTC
In today's telcon, we voted to close this without change to the specification.

It could be simplified, but it's not wrong, and most developers have been able to figure this out. We do not believe that this is worth doing at this point.