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>>> Robustness Principle: Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others. It’s a design guideline for software and a good rule for li
by blickentwapft 6y ago
>>> Robustness Principle: Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others. It’s a design guideline for software and a good rule for life:
My understanding is this is flat out wrong and bad for software development. Design software that is rigid in both what it accepts and sends. Loose standards lead to incompatiblities and chaos. Tightly define. This is not to say that your design should be inflexible, but for example a specification for data interchange should not accommodate loosely or incorrectly structured data.
- mongol 6y agoThis is also called Postel's Law after Jon Postel who worked on designing TCP. I think it has merit.
- relaxing 6y agoThe success of email and HTML disagree with you. Also most human interactions. The standards definitions aren’t loose. But the network effect means everyone benefits when more nodes can exchange data because the individual implementations are forgiving of misformatted messages.