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Bob Wyman wrote,
> I would like to be "conservative" in what I generate, but the
> problem is that as an intermediary, I'm being fed a lot of stuff that
> was generated "liberally". So, I'm in a bind... One interpretation of
> Postel's law would say that I should do my best to output proper RSS
> V2.0 while being liberal about what I accept. However, another set of
> rules (i.e. intermediaries should minimize how much they muck with
> content passing through...) would force me to generate non-conforming
> feeds. How do I solve this dilemma?
This is almost exactly the problem I faced a few years back, again wrt
an intermediary, but at a lower level,
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ietf-http-wg-old/1999SepDec/0028.html
Interpolating a bit, the consensus seemed to be that there could be no
hard and fast answer, because the appropriate behaviour would be
dependent on the exact semantics the type of message in question, the
natures of the breakage and the proposed fixups, and the way they
affect the message semantics wrt the intentions and expectations of the
sender and receiver.
Intermediaries will always be in this bind: they can't guarantee that
they will be able to deliver a correct response to a correct request
because they're at the mercy of the behaviour of the upstream server.
Cheers,
Miles
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