[Doc-SIG] formalizing StructuredText
Edward D. Loper
edloper@gradient.cis.upenn.edu
Wed, 21 Mar 2001 12:19:44 EST
> Well, prepare to be well miffed (ST has never supported differing
> starting and ending quotes). So hey.
Although now we have [...] (or "..."[...] or "...":[...] or whatever
it really is).
> It should (eventually) in the '"..."' text, but not in the URL itself.
> This is actually a good reason to forbid apostrophe in URLs,
Of course, you can't reasonably forbid '#' in URLs, so you'll have
to put URL recognition before inline recognition *anyway*.. :)
> and may
> mean I need to put the URL recognition *before* literal recognition -
> no, that won't work, 'cos then I couldn't say
>
> 'http://www.literal.org/'
>
> Hmm. This is a no-win situation, I'm afraid. Ah - no it's not, because
> I'm requiring the user to escape spaces in a URL, and not to end with
> "funny" characters, so it *should* actually come out in the wash - we'll
> need to make some careful test cases...
I think there's a serious problem here if we are allowing URLs to
appear in arbitrary places. For example, consider::
foo://no#good bar://parse#for this.
It seems perfectly reasonable for #good bar...# to be a literal..
But then it also seems reasonable for those to be urls..
Possible ways out:
1. Say that the opening '#' must have whitespace to its left,
and the closing '#' must have whitespace to its right. Of
course, that forbids saying things like #Object#s, but I
guess I could live with that
2. Use some special demarkation for URLs! :) I'm for this,
but am worried about trying to convince the STNG people,
esp. if we're proposing using <..>.. Since they're currently
saying that such things should be ignored. Of course, they're
clearly wrong on that point, too, but it means that I'll have
to argue 2 different points at once. :) Also, if we do this,
we have to be sure to stress in the PEP/ST docs that math
must go in literals like: 'x*y>z'. (Of course, we'll probably
want to stress that anyway).
Are there any objections in principle for using <...> to delimit
URLs? (Other than that it will be hard to convince STNG people).
If not, I think we should start trying to convince STNG people to
use <...> for URLs, and to give up on ignoring <...> tokens.
-Edward