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Re: Postel's law, exceptions


Re:  Postel's law
At 12:21 AM -0500 1/14/04, Michael Champion wrote:

>The best statement I know of this point of view is Uche Ogbuji's 
>"Serenity Through Markup" piece 
>http://www.adtmag.com/article.asp?id=6758  " As documents move 
>between systems, trust the remote system's ability to interpret the 
>document to meet its own local needs. This is known as the principle 
>of loose coupling, and is reminiscent of the idea of late binding in 
>programming theory. In the technology sphere, the idea is that an 
>XML document used in a transaction between multiple systems need not 
>always build in all possible aspects of the combined systems. Source 
>systems design documents to meet their needs, while the target 
>system interprets them to its own needs. ... [This can be done with] 
>pipelines of data, where a document starts out in one form and ends 
>up in one suited for a different environment."   Sean McGrath has 
>written a lot about the pipeline approach too, but all I can find 
>are PPT presentations.

This is also the point of view taken by Walter Perry. However, what 
you're missing here is the assumption (certainly in Walter's case, 
and I think in Uche's and Sean's as well) that the documents are 
well-formed. They are willing to process invalid documents. However, 
well-formedness is their minimum requirement. Although the Atom folks 
frequently confuse their language, what they seem to be asking for is 
the option to pass around malformed documents. I have no objection if 
they want to pass around invalid documents that do not actually 
satisfy the Atom specification. Indeed I can conceive several very 
good reasons for doing exactly that. However, passing around 
malformed documents is much nastier, and should be prohibited.
-- 

   Elliotte Rusty Harold
   elharo@m...
   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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