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This is also widely considered a bad idea now. Making liberal consumers allows for sloppy producers. Over time this requires new consumers to conform to these s
by bhldr 8y ago
This is also widely considered a bad idea now. Making liberal consumers allows for sloppy producers. Over time this requires new consumers to conform to these sloppy producers to maintain compatibility.
Just look at the clusterfuck that HTML5 has become. You need to have extremely deep pockets to enter that market.
- rhapsodic 8y ago> Just look at the clusterfuck that HTML5 has become. You need to have extremely deep pockets to enter that market. What do you mean by "enter that market"?
- hyperdimension 8y agoI think they mean needing deep pockets to write a new browser, with all the complexity that modern HTML+JS entails.
- projektfu 8y agoThe good news is that Firefox and chromium have pretty open licenses so you only need to change what you want. Of course you need to grok it, which isn't trivial. But writing a browser hasn't been easy since... Cello?
- ric2b 8y agoForking an existing browser ins't exactly writing a new browser, it's modifying one. That process very likely limits innovation in the space.
- taeric 8y agoDo you have a survey or other citation for it being a bad idea? I get that it enables bad behavior, per see. However, the idea of rejecting a customer/client because they did not form their request perfectly seems rather anti customer. Ideally, you'd both accept and correct. But that is the idea, just reworded.
- treve 8y agoThe problem with this idea is that different consumers might have a different subset of what they accept and correct. If some of those become dominant, produces might start depending on that behavior and it becomes a de facto standard. This is literally what has happened to HTML, but holds true for many other Internet protocols. If you're looking for some external reading, I found at least this: * https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-thomson-postel-was-wrong https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-thomson-postel-was-wrong I think you'll find few protocol designers arguing _for_ the robustness principle these days.
- taeric 8y agoYou'll also find few protocol designers designing anything as robust as the old protocols. :) I mean, don't go out of your way to under specify input. But relatively nobody is going back to the heavy schema of xml over simple json. Even if they probably should. I feel this is an anti fragile position. Try not to encourage poor input. But more importantly, be resilient to it. Not dismissive of it.
- bhldr 8y agoRobust as the old protocols? The early TCP protocols are very much underspecified. Maybe you have something else in mind.
- taeric 8y agoFair. I view them as what they grew into. Not as what they were initially designed as. Probably not a straight forward comparison. I've just gotten weary of so many replacement protocols that get dreamed up and go nowhere. Often because they didn't actually learn all of the lessons from predecessors.
- shagie 8y agoThe Harmful Consequences of Postel's Maxim - https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-thomson-postel-was-wrong-00 https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-thomson-postel-was-wrong-0... (HN from 2015 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9824638 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9824638 ) Wrestling with Postel’s Law https://techblog.workiva.com/tech-blog/wrestling-postel’s-law https://techblog.workiva.com/tech-blog/wrestling-postel’s-la...
- digi_owl 8y agoThe HTML5 clusterfuck comes from having the biggest players being allowed to adjust the goal as they see fit, when they see fit (aka "living document").
- _greim_ 8y ago> Just look at the clusterfuck that HTML5 has become. Ouch. I feel like this is kind of unfair. XML, HTML1-4, and HTML5 all differ in how they treat Postel's law. XML rejects it at the spec level; if you send garbage to a parser it bails immediately, which is nice. HTML5 embraces Postel's law at the spec level. If you send garbage to an HTML5 parser, there's an agreed-on way to deal with it gracefully. Also nice. The problem was rather with HTML1-4, which embraced Postel's law promiscuously, at the implementation level. There were specs, but mainstream implementations largely ignored them and all handled garbage input slightly differently. This is what created the afore-mentioned clusterfuck.
- bhldr 8y agoYea this is absolutely what I meant. HTML5's complexity is a symptom of this problem. I'm a bit worried about the authors taking this overboard and trying to redefine the URL standard with similar complexity.
- erik_seaberg 8y agoHTML5 only provides the "be liberal in what you accept" error handling, they have never seen fit to write a "be conservative in what you send" grammar for authors and validators.