Fair enough, though it seemed disingenuous of OP to question the optimization of a hugely common process and say "just fix your code" when it's not applicable t

Fair enough, though it seemed disingenuous of OP to question the optimization of a hugely common process and say "just fix your code" when it's not applicable to a vast (majority?) number of (obvious?) cases. It's not like a huge part of today's computer software was not currently running on servers needing to check user input, including the very website we are commenting on. Browsers themselves need to do it too because they can't blindly trust what the server sends them. It seems like it almost takes effort to ignore those cases. To the point people commenting here even forget that there are other things than the web. If OP wanted to share with us the idea of moving validation to another step in the process, giving a case where it would be applicable, that would have been fine but why question an optimization in the first place? Why not both? It just feels like they are rejecting stuff for the sake of rejecting stuff and I assume this is the reason they got downvoted. UTF-8 validation is something that happens constantly. And even if it's was not, this optimization is probably an interesting technical feat, and we are in a Show HN post too, rejecting stuff like this is just not going to fly on HN. You can question things but you need to be insightful and nice. You make good points but OP didn't make them. Anyways.