On Wed, Jun 23, 2010 at 12:11 PM, Brendan Eich <[email protected]> wrote:
> > On Jun 23, 2010, at 8:17 AM, Mark S. Miller wrote: > > On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 8:17 PM, Dean Landolt <[email protected]>wrote: > >> I know many of us in the ES community tend to prefer a Postel's Law >> approach -- and as long as tabs are always properly stringified it's not a >> huge interop problem. Still, an argument could be made that with browsers >> accepting known-bad input (per the JSON spec) it >> could encourage fragmentation (albeit it minor) of the one format that's >> really delivered on the promise of true interoperability. >> > > Yes. On the web, as the sorry history of browsers shows too clearly, Eich's > law may be the more relevant one: > > From Dave Herman's blog at < > http://calculist.blogspot.com/2010/02/eichs-law.html>: > > Found this gem in a C++ comment while digging in the SpiderMonkey > codebase<http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/js/src/jsscan.cpp#1464> > : > > After much testing, it's clear that Postel's advice to protocol designers > ("be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send") invites > a natural-law repercussion for JS as "protocol": > > "If you are liberal in what you accept, others will utterly fail to be > conservative in what they send." > > The comment is unsigned, but it sounds like Brendan. > > > I still think the Robustness Principle in full [1] is worth upholding. > Validation, especially in developer facing modes or tools (error consoles, > debuggers), is important. > > But tardy validation that annoys users by trying in vain to repeal a > de-facto standard is worse than pointless. You don't get a second chance > (dherman's blog post cites a comment I wrote about how <!-- comments, > treated by JS in browsers as single-line comments, leak from inline script > content into out-of-line .js files). And browser vendors will not risk > losing market share on quixotic quests. > > Nevertheless, if we can ban TAB per the ES5 JSON spec, let's do it. > SpiderMonkey currently allows it as noted, but someone will file a bug (if > it's not already on file). > Done: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=574153 http://code.google.com/p/v8/issues/detail?id=751 https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=41102 > > I don't know whether TABs are an issue in the field that could make > browsers playing the Prisoner's Dilemma defect from that spec. It is > possible, since as Ollie notes so many extant JSON implementations allow > them. OTOH TABs are rare in my experience. Worth discussing and (what would > be much more useful) field testing. IE9 is head on that front. > > But I hate tab characters, so I'm rooting for the home team here ;-). > > /be > > [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle > -- Cheers, --MarkM
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