Respec: variable inlines should support generic types

[marcoscaceres]

For example:

Let |networks:sequence<DOMString>| be an empty DOMString sequence.

[saschanaz]

Should also support spaced types e.g. unsigned long long.

[marcoscaceres]

Yeah, ran into that today 😁

[marcoscaceres]

I think we can basically just split on ":"... left side is variable, right side is type. Done.

[sidvishnoi]

Right side is type already. We need to update the regex. Maybe like

- \\B\\|\\w[\\s\\w]*\\w(?:\\s*\\:\\s*\\w+)?\\|\\B
+ \\B\\|\\w[\\s\\w]*\\w(?:\\s*\\:.+)?\\|\\B

[marcoscaceres]

But if we know everything on the right of : is type, what would we do with the regex?

[sidvishnoi]

Regex is for splitting the text in subtxt. We can have a simpler regex like \B\|.+(?:\:.+)\|\B. I'm not sure of the cases it may go "bad" - like over matching text.
Context: https://github.com/w3c/respec/blob/6e87fc6df575090f2ae77d82d9c8ae416c8c503a/src/core/inlines.js#L139

https://github.com/w3c/respec/blob/6e87fc6df575090f2ae77d82d9c8ae416c8c503a/src/core/inlines.js#L101-L102

[marcoscaceres]

I was thinking if we could send the type into webidl2.js, we can get back a simple AST. Then we could have some fun :)

[marcoscaceres]

@saschanaz, wdyt of the comment above? Doable?

[saschanaz]

webidl2.js is not exposing classes yet, and even if it did the classes doesn't support parsing string snippets yet. Supporting that would be absolutely great, though.

[marcoscaceres]

Ok, we should come up with a simple replica of https://github.com/w3c/webidl2.js/#idl-type

[sidvishnoi]

Closed via https://github.com/w3c/respec/pull/2221

[Swapnilr1]

@sidvishnoi Well I don't think #2221 fully solves this, at least as per the discussion related to getting AST from WebIDL2 module.

[saschanaz]

We can open a new issue 😀