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0 pointsusrbinbash1y ago0 comments

Oh, I am nothing but liberal when it comes to CSV: Clients get the liberty to either have their requests processed, or get a 400 BAD REQUEST

And yes, I am aware that the standard says this. My counter question to that is: How much client-liberty do I have to accept? Where do I draw the line? How much is too much liberty?

And the answer is: there is no answer. Wherever any system draws that line, it's an arbitrary decision; Except for one, which ensures the least surprise and maximum interoperability (aka. the point of a standard): to be "conservative", and simply demand the standard.

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geoelectric1y ago

I think the suggestion reflected a deep understanding that transitioning from decades of wild-west to standardized in the smooth fashion most likely to succeed would require that strategy.

If you don’t accept whatever some org’s data is encoded with, they won’t consider it a win for standards, or swap out whatever is producing that data for something more compliant. They’ll consider it a bug, and probably use some other more flexible processor.

On the other hand, if you can be flexible enough to allow quirks on import while not perpetuating them on export, eventually you and other software built with the same philosophy standardize the field.

I do think there’s a point where things are standardized enough that you can safely stop doing that—when all the extra quirk code is so rarely used as to be irrelevant—but I’m unsure if we’ve reached it yet. It would be something to actually analyze, though, rather than just a philosophical decision.

usrbinbashOP1y ago

> On the other hand, if you can be flexible enough to allow quirks on import while not perpetuating them on export, eventually you and other software built with the same philosophy standardize the field.

How? The only thing I can see happening is perpetuation of sloppy use of standards. "Why, why should I change my |-deliminated CSV dialect that requires a double-semicolon at the end of each row, which is arbitrarily denoted by either \n or \r or \n\r when all those programmers will accomodate me, no matter how little sense it makes to do so?

> I do think there’s a point where things are standardized enough that you can safely stop doing that

I agree. And that point was when someone sat down, and penned RFC-4180

Everything after that point, has to justify why it isn't RFC compliant, not the other way around.

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