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> These documents are alternatively treated as holy texts by developers who parse them for hidden meanings, then shunned as irrelevant because they can’t be und
by pwdisswordfish9 5y ago
> These documents are alternatively treated as holy texts by developers who parse them for hidden meanings, then shunned as irrelevant because they can’t be understood.
My biggest problem with reading RFCs is not because they are hard to understand, it’s because they are vague, underspecified or don’t accurately describe reality.
The most infamous example of underspecification being, of course, JSON.
- andi999 5y agoI thought json is fully specified. Or just not in the rfc?
- gumby 5y agoWhat is a number?
- pwdisswordfish9 5y ago<https://seriot.ch/projects/parsing_json.html https://seriot.ch/projects/parsing_json.html> Much of the implementation divergence is the fault of underspecification (though not all; some of it is just shoddy coding in its own right). The original RFC described only the grammar of JSON, not equivalence of JSON texts or normalization. Later specifications try to paper over that fact by specifying certain interoperability conditions without outright requiring them for conformance.