Re: Who can express URL syntax with BNF

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Date: Fri, 29 Apr 1994 20:33:19 +0200
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From: Tony Sanders <sanders@BSDI.COM>
To: Multiple recipients of list <www-talk@www0.cern.ch>
Subject: Re: Who can express URL syntax with BNF 
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Organization: Berkeley Software Design, Inc.

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