On 10/24/2010 9:55 PM, Mark Delany wrote:
Well, I'm clearly the outlier here, but I think "be liberal" is
protocol nonsense that has been accepted as "conventional wisdom" for
far too long now.
Put another way, "Accept crud and pass it on" constitutes good
protocol design? Gimme a break.
Jon Postel did not intend the interpretation that folks apply. As you note,
carried to the current extreme, it produces silliness.
His statement was meant to refer to the handling of protocol ambiguities. No
matter how well a protocol is written, there are places that wind up being
subject to slightly different interpretation. Especially during early stages
of
deployment, these ambiguities are discerned incrementally and often not
resolved
for quite awhile. In these circumstances, code that supports the differing
interpretations is more robust.
The situation with email comes from the rather different problem that
complaints
are from recipients and directed at their local operators, who have no control
over the sources of the problems. So they hack their own code infinitely, to
reduce local complaints. That produces the silly cruft.
d/
--
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net
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