Re: [calsify] AD review of draft-ietf-calext-jscalendar-23

[Barry Leiba <[e-mail]>]

I'm not going to hold out and block things on this point, so if the
working group really want to stay with the harder-to-follow version
I'll step aside.  But I do feel that using an alternative structure
where one alternative is optional and the other is not... is really
unnecessarily confusing.  The text certainly make the default clear,
and keep in mind that ABNF is not intended to convey such things as
defaults.

Barry

On Wed, Feb 19, 2020 at 3:32 PM Michael H Deckers
<[e-mail]> wrote:
>
>
> On 2020-02-19 06:58, Barry Leiba wrote:
>
>
>
> > — Section 1.4.6 —
> >
> >         signed-duration = (["+"] / "-") duration
> >
> > I guess this works.  I think this is a bit cleaner.  No?:
> >
> > NEW
> >         signed-duration = ["+" / "-"] duration
> > END
> >
> > (I passed the original by a colleague as a check, and he kept looking
> > at it with varying puzzled expressions before he agreed that he
> > understood it.  Let’s not make people work that hard.)
>
>
>
>     I beg to disagree. The syntax
>
>        (["+"] / "-") duration
>
>     makes it clear that a sign may precede a duration, and that
>     the default sign (if none is explicit) is "+". The proposed
>     syntax
>
>        ["+"  / "-"] duration
>
>     does not make the default clear.
>
>     Actually, the following text lists the two
>     alternatives as in the former syntax rule, so I do
>     not expect difficulties in understanding.
>
>     Michael Deckers.
>