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At 8:34 PM -0500 1/13/04, Rich Salz wrote:
>The thing "they" all seem to miss about the Postel quote, was that it was
>written as part of a specification, and referred to that spec. When
>there's "wiggle room" in the spec, be liberal in what you accept, and
>conservative in what you implement. Where there's no ambiguity (over
>there, in the box), the rule doesn't apply.
>
The original statement of the law comes from section 2.10 of RFC 793
which can be found here:
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/rfc/rfc793.txt
The actual quote is:
TCP implementations will follow a general principle of robustness: be
conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from
others.
Clearly at the the time Postel meant it to apply only to TCP. It's
not obvious to me that he was referring only to spec interpretation
here. Perhaps that becomes clear when this is read in the context of
the whole TCP spec. But whether he meant it or not, the weak form of
Postels' law is a lot more palatable to me than the strong form.
--
Elliotte Rusty Harold
elharo@metalab.unc.edu
Effective XML (Addison-Wesley, 2003)
http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/effectivexml
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0321150406/ref%3Dnosim/cafeaulaitA
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