11 Feb
2020
11 Feb
'20
9:51 p.m.
On Tue, Feb 11, 2020 at 11:24:25AM +0000, Ralph Corderoy wrote:
Perhaps I'm being too kind, but I think people are being a little hard
on Jon. I believe what he was pushing for was "it just works". Anyone
who has been involved with a long lived software base knows that as you
roll out new versions you can break backwards compat. Nobody likes it
when you do that.
>
Postel's principle: "be conservative in what you do, be liberal in
> what you accept from others" was doctrine in early HTML specs, and
> led to disastrous disagreement among browsers' interpretation of web
> pages. Sadly, the "principle" lives on despite its having been
> expunged from the HTML spec.
I often point to this Internet Draft when Postel's Law is brought up in
modern discussions about letting standards slip.
The Harmful Consequences of Postel's Maxim
M. Thomson, Mozilla, 2015-03-09
https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-thomson-postel-was-wrong-00
After looking at divergence over time, and long-term costs, it suggests
instead ???Protocol designs and implementations should be maximally
strict???. A shame it never became an RFC.
Arguing Postel's Law for accepting to deviate is easy as those arguing
for strictness have to work out how the laxness could cause a problem.