- From: Robin Berjon <robin@w3.org>
- Date: Tue, 25 Sep 2012 15:27:37 +0200
- To: Noah Mendelsohn <nrm@arcanedomain.com>
- CC: W3C TAG <www-tag@w3.org>
On 25/09/2012 15:11 , Noah Mendelsohn wrote: > This seems like a classic example of what I view as a sometime breakdown > of Postel's Law [1]. When you're "liberal" in what you consume, system > robustness depends equally on others being "conservative" in what they > send. This is a case where there's a lot of emphasis on documenting the > appropriate ways of being "liberal"; it's unclear that we have in place > the social and/or technical mechanisms to ensure that producers will be > equally diligent in their conservatism. I believe that the idea is that once the rules that describe processing as it happens are written down, you write test suites that can prove conformance. This does tend to have a strong effect, particularly if coupled with rules about processing erroneous input. Well-defined error handling that produces something predictable (rather than blow up) is actually a modern and more pragmatic reformulation of Postel, IMHO. -- Robin Berjon - http://berjon.com/ - @robinberjon
Received on Tuesday, 25 September 2012 13:28:37 UTC