
Postel's Law enabled the proto-Internet - garry
https://blog.garrytan.com/how-postels-law-enabled-the-proto-internet-and-set-the-culture-for-the-future-of-humanity
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ncmncm
Postel's law has since turned out to be a disaster for security, and for
evolving interfaces in a controlled way even where no security flaw motivates
the evolution.

When a server or API is "tolerant", with multiple implementations of an
protocol, it becomes difficult or even impossible to know if it will
"tolerate" your new request by doing the wrong thing, instead of nothing. The
API equivalent might be "tolerating" a null pointer by treating it as the
empty string, instead of failing, preventing early detection of corrupted data
structures.

This has made evolving, e.g., TLS very hard, and delayed security improvements
by years.

