4 ms·
> I'm hoping this is satire. Why intentionally introduce potential bugs for the sake of making a point? It’s worse than satire. Postel’s Law is definitively wr
by amluto 2y ago
> I'm hoping this is satire. Why intentionally introduce potential bugs for the sake of making a point?
It’s worse than satire. Postel’s Law is definitively wrong, at least in the context of network protocols, and delimiters, especially, MUST be precise. See, for example:
https://www.postfix.org/smtp-smuggling.html https://www.postfix.org/smtp-smuggling.html
Send exactly what the spec requires, and parse exactly as the spec requires. Do not accept garbage. And LF, where CRLF is specified, is garbage.
- tptacek 2y agoIf two systems agree, independent of any specification someone somewhere else wrote, to accept a bare NL where a CRLF is specified, that is not "garbage". Standards documents are not laws; the horse drags the cart.
- DaiPlusPlus 2y ago> Standards documents are not laws; the horse drags the cart. They can be: c.f. legally-enforced safety-regulations.
- tptacek 2y agoThese aren't.
- perching_aix 2y agoLaws are also just some ink on paper (and are routinely overruled, circumvented or unenforced in certain jurisdictions), so using this kind of logic in order to encourage standard violations is unsound. There is a method to this madness, and that's revising the standards.
- tptacek 2y agoWhat's a "standard violation"? The original history of the IETF is a rejection of exactly this mode of thinking about the inviolability of standards, which was the ethos of the OSI.
- perching_aix 2y agoWhen an implementation is noncomformant to a standard in question.
- tptacek 2y agoIETF standards are tools to help developers get stuff done on the Internet. They are not the only tool, and they don't carry any moral force.
- perching_aix 2y agoApart from colloquially considering standards not-necessarily-normative being, in my opinion, nonsensical (see below), to the best of my knowledge at the very least the STD subseries of IETF standards documents are normative in nature: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/std https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/std > They are not the only tool, and they don't carry any moral force. Indeed there are countless other standards bodies in the world also producing normative definitions for many things, so I'm definitely a bit confused why the focus on IETF specifically. To be even more exact, I do not know of any standards bodies who would publish what they and the world consider as standards, that would be entirely, or at least primarily, informational rather than normative in nature. Like, do I know the word "standard" incorrectly? What even is a point of a standard, if it doesn't aim to control?
- tptacek 2y agoOk, but just to be clear: the standards-track HTTP RFC says you can use a single LF. I don't think this issue is as clear as people seem to want it to be.
- perching_aix 2y agoAh, this is a subthread about HTTP specifically - didn't notice. Explains why you focused on the IETF too. Nevertheless, my points I believe still all stand. As for HTTP or any other protocols' definitions go, I'd rather not join in on that back and forth. I'd imagine it's well defined what's expected. Skim reading RFC-2616 now certainly suggests so.
- djbusby 2y agoThat's just two systems that happen to agree on garbage.
- throwaway19972 2y agoAt that point, what does garbage even mean? There's just functional software and non-functional software.
- Joker_vD 2y agoThis is, by the way, exactly the stance the Microsoft used to have in the 90-s and 00-s on the standards (it probably still has). And MS caught a lot of flak for that, for a very good reason.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]