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

• To: 'xml-dev@l... ' <xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: Re: Postel's "Law": A question for liberal parsers
• From: Michael Champion <mc@x...>
• Date: Thu, 15 Jan 2004 18:53:18 -0500
• In-reply-to: <004201c3db9f$88dd3fb0$650aa8c0@BOBDEV>
• References: <004201c3db9f$88dd3fb0$650aa8c0@BOBDEV>

On Jan 15, 2004, at 2:41 PM, 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?
>
I think the term "Service Oriented Architecture" might help organize 
your thoughts: What service are you providing?  Do you offer more than 
one?  How can the "customer" tell you about the service(s) they wish to 
receive from you?.  If you have the technical means, you could offer a 
raw but routed feed and a filtered, routed feed.  Even a semantically 
cleaned up feed, as long as you document the rules (e.g., "we'll use 
the current date as the starting point for any guesses about an 
ambiguous date.")  It depends on what problems your consumers are 
trying to solve with the data you provide.

  Likewise, consider whatever you do as an experiment, sortof like 
Amazon offering both a REST and SOAP/WSDL interface to their services.  
Learn from the successes and failures of the people downstream (and 
whatever success or failure you have in convincing upstream people to 
clean up their data).  And let the rest of us know what you learn!

Don't worry too much about Postel's "Laws" or any of this other stuff. 
I'm sure plenty of people will give you opposing advice (or 
authoritative declarations that you are totally wrong, broken, and 
clueless) no matter which you do or what combinations you offer.  My 
only advice is to remember that you are exploring the unknown; nobody 
REALLY knows what will work, what will break, and which of today's 
standards and best practices will be taken seriously 5 or 10 years from 
now.  It's possible that doing the expedient thing to keep customers 
happy will pollute the memespace and keep XML/RSS/Atom/whatever from 
reaching its full potential.  It's certain, however, that it won't 
reach its full potential if it is stillborn for lack of ability to 
solve real problems for real people.

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

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