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0 pointsseoaeu3y ago0 comments

> "Be liberal in what you accept and strict in what you send" is still a good principle.

No, it is a terrible principle which produces brittle software and impossible to implement standards. The problem is that no one actually follows the “be strict in what you send” part, and just goes with whatever cobbled together mess the other existing software seems to accept. Before long, a spec compliant implementation can’t actually understand any of the messages that are being sent

> just having old tools silently ignoring the new format that they don't understand.

This sounds like another headache. I don’t want my tools silently breaking.

0 comments

TuringTest3y ago

> This sounds like another headache. I don’t want my tools silently breaking.

Yet here you are, posting your comment through a web browser on a web page. And the new standard that was intended to make web pages display catastrophic failure and stop processing with each error (XHTML) was never widely adopted. Makes you wonder why? Maybe the nature of an open data platform for human consumption has something inherent to it so that it's better to accept a certain degree of inaccuracy and inconsistencies in its stored data?

seoaeuOP3y ago

> Maybe the nature of an open data platform for human consumption has something inherent to it so that it's better to accept a certain degree of inaccuracy and inconsistencies in its stored data?

That's complete nonsense. The only reason that web browsers accept malformed webpages is because there were already orders of magnitude too many webpages that violated the relevant specs when XHTML was introduced. If web browsers had enforced XHTML from the start, then everyone would have damn well followed it.

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