Re: [arch-d] deprecating Postel's principle - considered harmful

[Phillip Hallam-Baker <[e-mail]>]

On Thu, May 9, 2019 at 10:00 PM Keith Moore <[e-mail]>
wrote:

> p.s.  I've often said that "the web" was optimized for deployability.
> Lots of "the web" was poorly designed, IMO, but enough of it was
> designed just well enough to make it attractive to users, and that very
> attractiveness is what has fueled the effort required to improve it.   A
> similar statement could be made of the Internet itself.  As an engineer,
> this bugs me a bit, but I think it's reality.   It's often said that the
> perfect is the enemy of the good, but maybe sometimes, the good is the
> enemy of the deployable.   Being liberal in what you accept is similar,
> in a sense, to optimizing for deployability.
>

Damn right it was. Deployability was the primary consideration. We did not
use SGML because any of us liked it or considered it to be a solid
technical specification. We hated it and we though it was crap. The reason
we went there was that we needed buy-in from the publishing world.

But equally importantly, we broke a lot of what people thought were the
rules. I knew that there wasn't a Content-Length header in MIME when I
added it to the HTTP spec and so did Tim. But we pretended it did because
we needed to make the POST method work and we were not going to introduce
mandatory content body framing or SMTP type escaping.

A lot of the reason that the Web is the way it was is that the exponent
kicked in the growth curve while we were still trying to work out the
architecture. And the Web grew much much faster than the bandwidth needed
to serve it. Back in 1994, caching proxy servers were essential
infrastructure needed to make the Web work. That isn't the case now. In
fact TLS-everywhere is rapidly making them obsolete.