I agree. It allows sloppy developers to be liberal in what they do, and leads to increasingly complex (and incompatible) implementations necessary to be compati

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