I think you're getting the wrong take away from these articles. The message is that the real world is messy so don't spend 2000 lines of code trying to validat

I think you're getting the wrong take away from these articles. The message is that the real world is messy so don't spend 2000 lines of code trying to validate it to a strict (simplistic) model. For example my bank's website couldn't deal with the fact that my street address was (representative example) "5/3 Hawthorn Street" because the '/' was an illegal character (as was -,: and a whole bunch of other separators I tried) - but that's how it appears in the Post Office's database. Some programmer has spent effort to implement the code to reject my legal (and incredibly common) style of address. It would have been far less effort not to have done that. By contrast the DVLA website just gives you a free input text area, perfect. Minimal effort for them, zero hassle for me.