
The Harmful Consequences of Postel's Maxim - okket
https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-thomson-postel-was-wrong-01
======
vitovito
How is this even a draft RFC?

It's like the author forgot about XML and the failures of its draconian error
handling and decided to do it all over again.

It ignores the reality of implementations, and of commercial software
development in general. Implementations aren't written in an ivory tower with
an endowment for long-term maintenance, they're written in ten days against
hand-wavy business requirements at companies that no longer exist in their
original form. Users will go elsewhere, to software which uses formats and
protocols which don't have draconian error handling.

Wishing it were another way won't make it so, it'll just give you XML all over
again.

Some discussions from the time, none of whose arguments this RFC addresses:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20081210125015/http://diveintoma...](https://web.archive.org/web/20081210125015/http://diveintomark.org:80/archives/2002/08/20/how_liberal_is_too_liberal)

[http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/001025](http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/001025)

[https://web.archive.org/web/20090416022813/http://diveintoma...](https://web.archive.org/web/20090416022813/http://diveintomark.org:80/archives/2003/01/22/parse_at_all_costs)

[https://web.archive.org/web/20090309211058/http://diveintoma...](https://web.archive.org/web/20090309211058/http://diveintomark.org:80/archives/2004/01/14/thought_experiment)

