Re: Postel's law

On May 23, 1:28 am, David BL <davi..._at_iinet.net.au> wrote:
> Have you heard of Postel's Law?
>
> "Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you
> send."
>
> I can imagine it being applied to many things. Eg file formats, APIs,
> compilers, databases ...
>
> I think it generally leads to unnecessary complexity and sweep errors
> under the carpet.
>
> Comments?

I always understood this in the context of standards (ad hoc and otherwise) to mean essentially backward compatibility. That's because, in communications protocols which is the context when I first learned this, newer standards tend to be more restrictive, more detailed. So a program that uses the newer standard should also, as much as possible, accept old protocols. But I never took it to mean to accept anything. At some point some older features need to die off. TV broadcast standards are a good example.

The discussion about HTML is interesting, but I see problems with HTML as less of an issue as the compatibility problem of all the other browser issues with JAVA, Java script, and uncounted plug-ins. As broken as it is, HTML still mostly works.

  Ed Received on Wed May 28 2008 - 14:17:45 CEST