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And this is precisely the point. If the very earliest browsers had insisted on correctness rather than permissively accepting broken HTML (and JS - see semicol

And this is precisely the point. If the very earliest browsers had insisted on correctness rather than permissively accepting broken HTML (and JS - see semicolon insertion), we would not now have a situation where browsers need to do a ton of work to allow graceful degradation in the face of awful markup, simply because the tooling would have evolved in the other direction. Postel's Law gains a little temporary sender convenience in exchange for a nasty mess of permanent receiver headaches.

DanBC 11y ago
Postel's law has two parts. Be gracious in what you receive is what most people are talking about, but be cautious in what you send is just as important. If people are using broken markup that's the problem that needs fixing. How many web devs bother with validation anymore? (And not for app like functionality, but for what should be simple text and images with a few menus - why are so many newspaper websites so awful?) https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc793 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc793 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.
- catnaroek 11y ago
  > but be cautious in what you send is just as important. How are you going to enforce this for everyone? > TCP implementations will follow a general principle of robustness (...) This rule has worked well for TCP implementors in large part because of their circumstances, which are very different from those of browser implementors and Web developers: (0) Priorities: How much do the following desiderata matter to each group: reliability, performance, new features? (1) Skill: What skills does a representative programmer from each group have? (2) Risk profile: How does each group cope with the possibility of design and implementation errors? How much technical debt are they willing to take? I'd contend that Postel's law doesn't scale beyond relatively small groups of highly skilled programmers, for whom reliability is paramount and trumps all other considerations.
- regularfry 11y ago
  The problem is that being conservative and precise isn't enough. You and I can both be conservative, but disagree on the specifics (given an ambiguous spec, for instance). A permissive receiver of both our data now has to support both sides of our disagreement forever.
  - DanBC 11y ago
    No they don't. They just have to not explode.
    - regularfry 11y ago
      They do if they have any competition. Browsers are the perfect example here: a browser which responds to broken HTML by not working, but not exploding either, is going to lose out to one which does work. That means market forces pin the disagreement in place.
      - DanBC 11y ago
        IE did well for many years. That's why people used quirks mode and work arounds. What's the current market share for IE? 30% 40%? That seems pretty good for a browser which for years was a broken malware propagating mess.
      - JdeBP 11y ago
        Put more succinctly: Gresham's Law trumps Postel's Principle.
alkonaut 11y ago
Exactly. So by being permissive from the start we now have this dumpster fire that prevents us from writing sane and performant code. Because we have to assume that with crap input the user doesn't want Imagine what C++ would look like if all compilers had to accept all different variations of it, and the result of compiling 100 almost valid C++ files should, as far as possible, be a program that runs in some sense. Most of the web pages I have ever written have probably been ill-formed because browsers don't tell me what's wrong, and instead show me a (nearly) working web page.
- catnaroek 11y ago
  > Imagine what C++ would look like if all compilers had to accept all different variations of it, and the result of compiling 100 almost valid C++ files should, as far as possible, be a program that runs in some sense. C++ is still a lot more permissive than it could and should be. > Most of the web pages I have ever written have probably been ill-formed because browsers don't tell me what's wrong, and instead show me a (nearly) working web page. Same here. The idea that JavaScript ought to be permissive and forgiving because its target audience doesn't know what they're doing turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy on the part of its designers.

DanBC 11y ago

Postel's law has two parts. Be gracious in what you receive is what most people are talking about, but be cautious in what you send is just as important. If people are using broken markup that's the problem that needs fixing. How many web devs bother with validation anymore? (And not for app like functionality, but for what should be simple text and images with a few menus - why are so many newspaper websites so awful?) https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc793 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc793 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.

catnaroek 11y ago
> but be cautious in what you send is just as important. How are you going to enforce this for everyone? > TCP implementations will follow a general principle of robustness (...) This rule has worked well for TCP implementors in large part because of their circumstances, which are very different from those of browser implementors and Web developers: (0) Priorities: How much do the following desiderata matter to each group: reliability, performance, new features? (1) Skill: What skills does a representative programmer from each group have? (2) Risk profile: How does each group cope with the possibility of design and implementation errors? How much technical debt are they willing to take? I'd contend that Postel's law doesn't scale beyond relatively small groups of highly skilled programmers, for whom reliability is paramount and trumps all other considerations.
regularfry 11y ago
The problem is that being conservative and precise isn't enough. You and I can both be conservative, but disagree on the specifics (given an ambiguous spec, for instance). A permissive receiver of both our data now has to support both sides of our disagreement forever.
- DanBC 11y ago
  No they don't. They just have to not explode.
  - regularfry 11y ago
    They do if they have any competition. Browsers are the perfect example here: a browser which responds to broken HTML by not working, but not exploding either, is going to lose out to one which does work. That means market forces pin the disagreement in place.
    - DanBC 11y ago
      IE did well for many years. That's why people used quirks mode and work arounds. What's the current market share for IE? 30% 40%? That seems pretty good for a browser which for years was a broken malware propagating mess.
    - JdeBP 11y ago
      Put more succinctly: Gresham's Law trumps Postel's Principle.

alkonaut 11y ago

Exactly. So by being permissive from the start we now have this dumpster fire that prevents us from writing sane and performant code. Because we have to assume that with crap input the user doesn't want Imagine what C++ would look like if all compilers had to accept all different variations of it, and the result of compiling 100 almost valid C++ files should, as far as possible, be a program that runs in some sense. Most of the web pages I have ever written have probably been ill-formed because browsers don't tell me what's wrong, and instead show me a (nearly) working web page.

catnaroek 11y ago
> Imagine what C++ would look like if all compilers had to accept all different variations of it, and the result of compiling 100 almost valid C++ files should, as far as possible, be a program that runs in some sense. C++ is still a lot more permissive than it could and should be. > Most of the web pages I have ever written have probably been ill-formed because browsers don't tell me what's wrong, and instead show me a (nearly) working web page. Same here. The idea that JavaScript ought to be permissive and forgiving because its target audience doesn't know what they're doing turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy on the part of its designers.