URLspråket

URLspråket is a formal language and notation designed to describe and manipulate Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) in a readable and machine-processable form. It provides a structured representation of a URL’s components—scheme, authority, path, query, and fragment—and of related metadata such as encoding rules, normalization, and parameter semantics. The language aims to enable precise specification, transformation, and validation of URLs across tools and services.

Origin and status: URLspråket is a conceptual proposal arising from discussions about URL normalization, routing, and web interoperability. It has been explored in academic and industry contexts as a way to formalize URL semantics and to support automated tooling for constructing and inspecting URLs.

Syntax and semantics: URLspråket defines tokens for common URL parts and operators for composition, decomposition, and transformation. A URL is described as a set of fields: scheme, authority, path, query, fragment, each with constraints on allowed characters and encoding. It supports normalization rules (for example, percent-encoding normalization, default port handling) and semantics for query parameters. The grammar aims to be implementable by parsers and to map to data structures such as JSON representations or abstract syntax trees. Optional prefixes can indicate canonical forms or variant parsing modes (strict versus loose).

Usage and impact: The language is intended to assist URL routing in web frameworks, link checking, SEO tooling, and content negotiation. By providing a formal specification, URLspråket can improve interoperability between systems that generate or consume URLs and facilitate automated verification and transformation of links.

See also: URL, URI, URL encoding, URL normalization.