Says you. There's an Internet draft where some guy from Mozilla basically said "Postel was wrong; the solution is to always be conservative" https://datatracker

Says you. There's an Internet draft where some guy from Mozilla basically said "Postel was wrong; the solution is to always be conservative" https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-iab-protocol-maintenance https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-iab-protocol-mai... However it's a draft so he only speaks for himself; it's not Internet law. He also doesn't get it. Deviancy being ignored by a parser shouldn't be interpreted as intent to support. Non-conforming use cases are accepted at the pleasure of the implementor. Consider this. The Internet never would have become popular and inclusive like it became if it was designed to be highly strict, structured, and ordered like Signalling System 7. I like the fact that a 14 year kid can write an HTTP client or server, if they want to, and if they do it'll most likely be mostly correct. Stuff like that makes people fall in love with the Internet from the earliest ages. If we look at the history of companies like DEC vs. PC it's pretty clear technology can't survive >1 generation when there's no career track for hobbyists. In some cases deviancy in protocols has helped standards become better. Consider HTML. If we had things Tim Berners Lee's way, we'd all be writing ugly verbose XHTML that validates. It wasn't until HTML5 that W3C embraced the chaos of the true standard and formalized the non-conformant use-cases (such as being able to omit <html>, <head>, </tr> </td>, </p>, etc.) and it made the HTML language much more pleasant. So we should take the concerns of the "always be conservative" crowd with a grain of salt. Because they're the people who wanted XHTML. They're the people who ban numbers like 0xC0,0x80 because some version of some Oracle or Microsoft piece software had a bug once. I don't like how people who embrace policies like that invariably write code that destroys text data in some misguided effort to keep people safe from themselves. There should be better reasons for preventing things which are possible from happening.