question about links parsing

[Ash]

On 7/18/20 2:18 AM, Katarina Eriksson wrote:
> cage <cage-dev at twistfold.it <mailto:cage-dev at twistfold.it>> wrote:
> 
>     On Fri, Jul 17, 2020 at 11:45:28AM -0400, Matthew Graybosch wrote:
>     If each  terms after the url  was optional i expect  the specs was
>     something like:
> 
>     =>[<whitespace>]<URL>[<whitespace>][<USER-FRIENDLY LINK NAME>]
> 
> 
> That one makes the whitespace separator between <URL> and <USER-FRIENDLY 
> LINK NAME> optional, making it hard to parse.
> 
> This is what you were looking for:
> 
> =>[<whitespace>]<URL>[<whitespace>[<USER-FRIENDLY LINK NAME>]]
> 
> However, I think it's reasonable to assume the ending whitespace was 
> unintentional and ignore it.
> 
> Postel's law:
> 
>      Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from 
> others
> 
> -- 
> Katarina
> 

For what it's worth, I think one should be careful in applying Postel's 
law, since it can encourage drift from the spec: if everyone else 
accepts messages that are misformatted in a particular way, then new 
implementations need to do so as well.

That being said, I think this case is simple enough that I would 100% 
support parsers tolerating the trailing whitespace, and even support 
changing the spec in the way you described.