Re: Postel's law

On May 28, 5:17 am, Ed Prochak <edproc..._at_gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

Well, no, not really. Postel's law is applicable to protocols that have only a single version.

> 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.

I think what we're talking about here, though, is the difference between "mostly works" and "works." Did you read the link Gene supplied?

On May 23, 10:21 pm, Gene Wirchenko <ge..._at_ocis.net> wrote:
>
> Joel Spolsky said it well:
> http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/03/17.html

Marshall Received on Wed May 28 2008 - 15:55:42 CEST