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Re: Postel's "Law": A question for liberal parsers

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: Postel's "Law": A question for liberal parsers
• From: Miles Sabin <miles@m...>
• Date: Thu, 15 Jan 2004 20:18:02 +0000
• In-reply-to: <004201c3db9f$88dd3fb0$650aa8c0@BOBDEV>
• References: <004201c3db9f$88dd3fb0$650aa8c0@BOBDEV>
• Sender: Miles Sabin <miles@m...>
• User-agent: KMail/1.5.4

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

• Follow-Ups:
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    • From: "Bill Kearney" <wkearney@i...>

• References:
  • Postel's "Law": A question for liberal parsers
    • From: "Bob Wyman" <bob@w...>

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