Mike M wrote:
Postel's Law from RFC 793 (ref. http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc793.txt)
2.10. Robustness Principle
TCP implementations will follow a general principle of robustness: be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.
(ref. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Postel)
Once again, I will champion "The Art of UNIX Programming" by ESR, and quote thusly:
However, heed also this warning:
The original HTML documents recommended “be generous in what you accept”, and it has bedeviled us ever since because each browser accepts a different superset of the specifications. It is the specifications that should be generous, not their interpretation.
-- Doug McIlroy
McIlroy adjures us to /design/ for generosity rather than compensating for inadequate standards with permissive implementations. Otherwise, as he rightly points out, it's all too easy to end up in tag soup.
## End quote from TAoUP
I suppose what's to be learned, is that one should be careful what you read into Postel's law. :)
Aaron S. Joyner -- TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug TriLUG Organizational FAQ : http://trilug.org/faq/ TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/ TriLUG PGP Keyring : http://trilug.org/~chrish/trilug.asc
