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RE: Postel's Law Has No Exceptions

• To: "Hunsberger, Peter" <Peter.Hunsberger@s...>,"Julian Reschke" <julian.reschke@g...>,"Joshua Allen" <joshuaa@m...>,"Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>,<xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: RE: Postel's Law Has No Exceptions
• From: "Julian Reschke" <julian.reschke@g...>
• Date: Wed, 20 Aug 2003 20:15:34 +0200
• Importance: Normal
• In-reply-to: <1E0CC447E59C974CA5C7160D2A2854EC097CFF@S...>

> From: Hunsberger, Peter [mailto:Peter.Hunsberger@s...]
> Sent: Wednesday, August 20, 2003 7:45 PM
> To: Julian Reschke; Joshua Allen; Simon St.Laurent;
> xml-dev@l...
> Subject: RE:  Postel's Law Has No Exceptions
>
>
> Julian Reschke <julian.reschke@g...> proposes:
>
> > The issue is different. If server A (sold by a big company and widely
> > deployed) accepts broken requests, clients may start relying
> > on that behaviour. Other, smaller vendors thereby have the
> > choice of either implementing to the spec (rejecting the
> > broken requests) or emulating the broken server behaviour.
> >
> > My point being, unless *everybody* is accepting the same kind
> > of broken requests, interoperability will actually be
> > *worse*. But if indeed everybody
> > *is* accepting the same requests, it would have made more
> > sense to actually define this as *correct* behaviour and have
> > draconian error checking.
>
> I don't think the situation works out that bad in reality: years ago I
> worked with a company that developed software for the exchange of X.12
> health care data and Blue Cross/Blue Shield ("standard") health care
> data.  Very regularly we would run into data produced by other vendors
> that did not conform to one standard or another.  I don't think we ever
> encountered a case where the vendor emitting the offending data was not
> willing to fix their software to emit conformant data...

I fear that depends on the vendor. I currently have a bug report open with a
major vendor where the bug was initially reported in April 2001 and still is
in. Right now they are asking for the "business impact" of the bug not being
fixed.

Julian


--
<green/>bytes GmbH -- http://www.greenbytes.de -- tel:+492512807760

• References:
  • RE: Postel's Law Has No Exceptions
    • From: "Hunsberger, Peter" <Peter.Hunsberger@s...>

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