http://i.imgur.com/6WtA0.png
(Sorry, it's Friday. Also, blame dchud for the idea.) -Sean On 4/6/11 4:53 PM, "Mike Taylor" <m...@indexdata.com> wrote: > On 6 April 2011 19:53, Jonathan Rochkind <rochk...@jhu.edu> wrote: >> On 4/6/2011 2:43 PM, William Denton wrote: >>> >>> "Validity" does mean something definite ... but Postel's Law is a good >>> guideline, especially with the swamp of bad MARC, old MARC, alternate >>> MARC, that's out there. Valid MARC is valid MARC, but if---for the sake >>> of file and its magic---we can identify technically invalid but still >>> usable MARC, that's good. >> >> Hmm, accept in the case of Web Browsers, I think general consensus is >> Postel's law was not helpful. These days, most people seem to think that >> having different browsers be tolerant of invalid data in different ways was >> actually harmful rather than helpful to inter-operability (which is >> theoretically the goal of Postel's law), and that's not what people do >> anymore in web browser land, at least not to the extremes they used to do >> it. > > But the idea that browsers should be less permissive in what they > accept is a modern one that we now have the luxury of only because > adherence to Postel's law in the early days of the Web allowed it to > become ubiquitous. Though it's true, as Harvey Thompson has observed > that "it's difficult to retro-fit correctness", Clay Shirky was also > very right when he pointed out that "You cannot simultaneously have > mass adoption and rigor". If browsers in 1995 had been as pedantic as > the browsers of 2011 (rightly) are, we wouldn't even have the Web; or > if it existed at all it would just be a nichey thing that a few > scientists used to make their publications available to each other. > > So while I agree that in the case of HTML we are right to now be > moving towards more rigorous demands of what to accept (as well, of > course, as being conservative in what we emit), I don't think we could > have made the leap from nothing to modern rigour. > > -- Mike
