RE: Regular expression for URI matching

[Nicolas LEHUEN <nicolas.lehuen@ubicco.com>]

The problem is when you have a developer that produces malformed content,
then compares development tool A and development tool B to decide which one
he'll buy. Development tool A, being more strict, rejects the developer's
content. Development tool B does not. So the developer buys the B product.
This is a phenomenon that keeps marketers and product managers awake at
night.

Maybe the solution is to educate the developer himself ?

Regards,
Nicolas

>-----Message d'origine-----
>De : Michael Brennan [mailto:Michael_Brennan@allegis.com]
>Envoyé : jeudi 23 août 2001 21:15
>À : xml-dev@lists.xml.org
>Objet : RE: Regular expression for URI matching
>
>
>Thanks for passing this along (although that regular 
>expression makes my
>brain hurt ;)). 
>
>It's too bad, though, that Altova is completely removing it. I 
>understand
>the reasoning. We've all heard the admonition: be strict in 
>what you create,
>be forgiving in what you accept. Unfortunately, the 
>overwhelming majority of
>developers follow the path of least resistance. Forgiving web 
>browsers is
>one reason there is so much buggy, malformed content on the 
>web. The typical
>web developer writes a web page, brings it up in the browser, and if it
>displays, they are done. If web browsers were more strict, 
>developers would
>produce more conformant content.
>
>Maybe Altova should just add an optional feature that lets a 
>user explicitly
>disable the URI checking. That way, at least, they could 
>accomodate their
>customers without inadvertently leading naive developers down 
>the path of
>bad practice.
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: John Cowan [mailto:cowan@mercury.ccil.org]
>> Sent: Wednesday, August 22, 2001 7:15 PM
>> To: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
>> Subject: Regular expression for URI matching
>> 
>> 
>> Alexander Falk of Altova, the XML Spy people, posted the following to
>> an internal W3C mailing list.  With his permission, I am reposting it
>> here so that it will be archived.  Anyone may use it, but this
>> information is provided "as-is" with no warranties whatsoever 
>> regarding
>> the correctness of the information.
>> 
>> ----- Forwarded message from Alexander Falk -----
>> 
>> This is the Regular Expression (RE) we originally used for the anyURI
>> dataype within our XML Spy product up until 4.0b2:
>> 
>> 	
>> (([a-zA-Z][0-9a-zA-Z+\\-\\.]*:)?/{0,2}[0-9a-zA-Z;/?:@&=+$\\.\\
>> -_!~*'()%]+)?(
>> #[0-9a-zA-Z;/?:@&=+$\\.\\-_!~*'()%]+)?
>> 
>> It was constructed according to the BNF grammar given in RFC 2396
>> (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt) and we used this RE to validate
>> elements and attributes whose datatype was anyURI.
>> 
>> However, we've found that (a) many customers actually use 
>> illegal URIs in
>> their documents happily, (b) XML Schema Part 2
>> (http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-2/#anyURI) doesn't require 
>> any validation of
>> the contents of the anyURI dataype, and (c) most customers 
>> don't want us to
>> validate stronger than what other processors are doing.
>> 
>> Therefore, we are currently eliminating the anyURI checking [...]
>
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