> > As for being liberal in what you expect being a bad thing- lets try an > > experiment. For the next month, you can only go to webpages that are > > WC3 validated, and who's servers put out perfect HTTP. Come back to us > > with how many sites you visited. I'll be impressed if you could make > > double digits. > > > > There's a reason most real world programs are liberal with inputs- they > > have to be. You can't expect the other guy to get his shit right, > > especially if he's not employed with you. And failing to the end user > > is not a good option, not when the error can be routed around. > > Let's try a different experiment. Let's let TCP fill in zeros for > packets it knows the size of but can't finish receiving and see how many > files you get transferred. > > I get to single digits but I *know* my files and web pages are correct. > You wind up with randomly corrupted files. > > TCP demands *perfect* packets for a reason. > > Being liberal is *not* always a good thing. Being pedantic is necessary > when doing data interchange. > > The only reason why being liberal with HTML works is that the end > consumer (a human) is doing error correction in the wetware using the > redundant information of language. >
YES! Being that I've read the specs for TCP/IP, HTTP/HTML, here's one for everyone to peek at: http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2119.html before you ever look at a spec again. Those normative words in specs like HTTP, HTML (and especially SMTP) are what make user level protocols flixible for the masses. Flexibility in TCP which is a conerstone of so many things these days is totally not acceptable. IF your'e web page comes through a little fuzzy because of unsupported tags, that's one thing, but if for example someone's rouder munges Time To Live (TTL) or something inproperly, concievably nobody's traffic could get anywhere. Personally I think XML is great, and there's a lot of efforts underway to optimize it for binary mode transmission etc. on the way. The fact is, it works, and it works well. It's likely you can come up with good tools for just special corner cases (which someone mentioned above) but as for something that works in every situation, you're probably not gonna find better then XML. -Tom -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
