[Bug-wget] Validity of angle brackets around WARC-Target-URI value

[William Prescott]

Hello,

It seems that there may be some ambiguity in the WARC standard
regarding the usage of angle brackets surrounding the URI given for a
WARC-Target-URI field.
In short, while the BNF grammar includes the brackets, the examples
presented in the standard do not. It would appear that tools have been
built to assume the lack of brackets, and may have issues when they
are present (this is how I learned about this.)

There is some discussion about this here:
https://github.com/iipc/warc-specifications/issues/23
https://github.com/iipc/warc-specifications/pull/24

One commenter states that the brackets have been removed in a newer
draft. I see that a new standard (ISO 28500:2017) was published in
August, but I don't have access to confirm if it says anything about
this.

A Wget bug report ( http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?47281 ) had been
submitted which resulted in the addition of the brackets in commit
100da11312a1781a3d5aa38760ce0e8bd9384659. An additional commit
(63c2aea2557b84640272629c7dc0caccab66ab6d) expanded the usage of
brackets to more block types which contained WARC-Target-URI -- this
was mentioned in
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-wget/2017-03/msg00006.html . The
specification PDF referenced in the report and mailing list post
contains the error (see "uri" in the grammar on page 5, and
"WARC-Target-URI" in the example on page 22 [C.2])


Given the unclear nature of this aspect of the standard, I don't know
exactly what action to suggest, but I did want to point it out.

Best regards,
William Prescott