3 ms·

I personally think being liberal in what you accept from others is the second worst evil in computer science. The worst being null, of course.

by sid0 15y ago

guard-of-terra 15y ago
Then you will also personally produce programs which would be broken for 5/6ths of the world population who happen to use letters outside latin1. There's no way to avoid it unless you wrap it up and add some explicit checks and guesses.
- tlrobinson 15y ago
  Won't all modern browsers include the encoding in the Content-Type header? They should. If so there's no need to guess.
  - guard-of-terra 15y ago
    It's not just browsers. Browsers are pretty sane when it comes to charsets, because they had the time to make it right and the pressure to do so. (It wasn't like that in times of NN4/IE4, which would interpret your text as whatever they want and won't even let you override) Facing to something less agamant (like dreaded id3 tags), no such luck.
hnbla 15y ago
Agree, this is why html ended up being the mess it is today. Because every browser wanted it their way and then every other browser and website has to implement things both their own way and everybody elses to not break the Internet. Now you've got 10 versions to support instead of one!
jrockway 15y ago
Hey now. If software started validating its input, what would virus writers do for a living?
tlrobinson 15y ago
I agree. It allows sloppy developers to be liberal in what they do, and leads to increasingly complex (and incompatible) implementations necessary to be compatible with all the edge cases. HTML is a good example. Browsers are very tolerate of malformed HTML, which is nice for beginners who don't want to worry too much about perfect syntax. The problem is each browser handles the unspecified cases differently, which leads to differences in the way pages are rendered, security issues like XSS, etc. Robustness should just be built into the protocol/format/spec, if necessary. HTML5 gets this right by specifying an algorithm that all parsers should use to get consistent behavior, while still being tolerant of imperfect syntax: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_soup#HTML5 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_soup#HTML5

I personally think being liberal in what you accept from others is the second worst evil in computer science. The worst being null, of course.

by sid0 15y ago

I personally think being liberal in what you accept from others is the second worst evil in computer science. The worst being null, of course.

guard-of-terra 15y ago

Then you will also personally produce programs which would be broken for 5/6ths of the world population who happen to use letters outside latin1. There's no way to avoid it unless you wrap it up and add some explicit checks and guesses.

tlrobinson 15y ago
Won't all modern browsers include the encoding in the Content-Type header? They should. If so there's no need to guess.
- guard-of-terra 15y ago
  It's not just browsers. Browsers are pretty sane when it comes to charsets, because they had the time to make it right and the pressure to do so. (It wasn't like that in times of NN4/IE4, which would interpret your text as whatever they want and won't even let you override) Facing to something less agamant (like dreaded id3 tags), no such luck.

hnbla 15y ago

Agree, this is why html ended up being the mess it is today. Because every browser wanted it their way and then every other browser and website has to implement things both their own way and everybody elses to not break the Internet. Now you've got 10 versions to support instead of one!

jrockway 15y ago

Hey now. If software started validating its input, what would virus writers do for a living?

tlrobinson 15y ago

I agree. It allows sloppy developers to be liberal in what they do, and leads to increasingly complex (and incompatible) implementations necessary to be compatible with all the edge cases. HTML is a good example. Browsers are very tolerate of malformed HTML, which is nice for beginners who don't want to worry too much about perfect syntax. The problem is each browser handles the unspecified cases differently, which leads to differences in the way pages are rendered, security issues like XSS, etc. Robustness should just be built into the protocol/format/spec, if necessary. HTML5 gets this right by specifying an algorithm that all parsers should use to get consistent behavior, while still being tolerant of imperfect syntax: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_soup#HTML5 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_soup#HTML5